


Someone Else's Reality

by OceanMelon



Category: Skip Beat!
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, Memory Loss, Slow Burn, lots of acting, sort of, sudden marriage
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-15
Updated: 2018-07-16
Packaged: 2018-08-22 13:11:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 22
Words: 67,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8286976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OceanMelon/pseuds/OceanMelon
Summary: Kyoko wakes up one morning next to a very blonde Tsuruga Ren. Somehow she's now twenty-six, has survived a serious car accident involving a truck, become a very successful actress, married to her mentor and long-time heart torturer. And she doesn't remember any of it.She could have sworn she was only seventeen last night.To make matters worse, Ren's forgotten, too. Now they both have to stumble through their new lives, juggling their search to regain their memories with their need to keep their problem a secret from the public.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I have to admit, I'm rather angry at myself for starting this when I have so much work to do and one already on-going, multi-chap fic that I should really be more committed to. Still, here we are in the Skip Beat fandom.

There was something under her fingers. It was soft but solid. Soft and solid and warm and it felt amazing. Her eyelids still felt impossibly heavy with sleep so she left them as they were and explored the thing with her fingertips. For some reason, she remembered this feeling covered in cloth, like a tablecloth over a table. But this was different to a table. Tables weren’t soft. Tables weren’t warm. And, when she found the edge of the thing, it didn’t have corners like a table. It didn’t even have a definite edge like her mattress might. It just sort of fell away in a gentle arc. Not to mention, there certainly wasn’t any cloth there right then. Just smooth and soft and solid and warm.

That was when she felt it.

A throbbing beneath her palm. At first she thought she could just feel her pulse in her fingers, as she sometimes could when there was nothing else for her mind to focus on. But that wasn’t it. The throbbing was  _ beneath _ her palm. The steady  _ thud, thud, thud  _ of someone else’s heart.

She screamed and scrambled away. She screamed when she fell off the bed. She screamed when she looked down and found herself not wearing anything. And then she screamed again when she whipped the sheet off the bed to cover herself and found the mystery, blonde man whose chest she had just been feeling up, was also naked. She was naked and alone with a strange man in a room she suddenly realised she didn’t recognise.

 

He woke suddenly. As people tended to when someone screamed at them in their sleep. He bolted upright and looked around frantically. His eyes took in the screaming woman, draped in all the linen from the bed, and his own nakedness and realised he might have done something unforgivable last night. But why? Had he been drunk? He didn’t feel hungover, though, so that didn’t seem plausible. Maybe he was just so lonely his body had stumbled out of the house on its own to find some way to relieve him in his sleep. 

He shuffled back until he hit the headboard, hiding the back half of his body with it and pulling a pillow over to cover the front. Then he turned to the woman to try and calm her down. With any luck, he could ask her what on earth had happened without letting slip that he didn’t remember anything. But, when he turned to her, he stopped. 

She looked both familiar and entirely unknown at the same time. Her wavy, chin length hair, he noticed when she turned her head to wildly take in the room, was very short at the back and stuck out in crazy, bed-head spikes. Her face was rather plain in the sense that it was ordinary. Common. Yet, she was by no means unattractive with her little cherub nose and round, golden eyes. 

All at once, it hit him who she looked like. 

“M… Mogami-san?” he murmured.

It was her but all grown up. Her round cheeks were gone. She was a little taller -- about five centimetres or so. Just enough for people to notice. He noted guiltily that she’d filled out and developed some curves as well. The Mogami-san he’d driven home the night before had been seventeen. This Mogami-san was probably ten years older than that. 

Kyoko stopped looking around frantically, trying to work out where she was, and actually looked at the mystery man before her. She’d been avoiding even letting him appear in her peripheral vision before. After all, he  _ was  _ a strange naked man. But then she looked at him. At his short blond hair, just long enough to start curling down onto his forehead, and his brilliant, golden-green eyes and the distance from his hip to his knee and his knee to his ankle, the angle of his shoulders and the length of his fingers.

She knew who she thought he was but those eyes and that hair were making her question her conclusion. So she played it safe.

“Corn?” she whispered back.

Ren froze. Why would she call him that? Unless… Oh God, they’d been sleeping. Of course he didn’t have his contacts in.

So, what should he do? He’d promised himself that he’d tell her everything the next time she saw Corn but somehow that didn’t seem like a good idea just then, given the circumstances. There was no need to pile some additional trauma on top of waking up like this. But that was cheating, right? No doubt, the next time an opportunity came there’d be some other reason why that wasn’t a good time, either. And the longer he lied to her, the more angry she’d be when he eventually had to tell her. So he’d just keep going, lying to her forever? Always promising himself ‘next time, next time’?

He sighed and went to get up. He’d tell her when she wasn’t forced to look at bits of him he’d much rather keep private. That was the best compromise his head could come up with. 

It was only then that he realised this wasn’t his room. He was pretty sure it wasn’t anywhere in the Darumaya, either. So, what? He’d booked a hotel room for the night that should never have happened and he didn’t remember? But that didn’t seem right, either. The room was weirdly to his tastes. There was none of that ‘sleeping in a stranger’s room’ feeling that came with hotels. No cold, lifeless art on the walls that was chosen for it’s price and design qualities rather than actual personal preference. There weren’t instructions on how to work the air conditioning or a list of what TV channels were on which numbered stations or a diagram of where to meet in case of an emergency. There was a book in English on top of the bedside table, which seemed odd for a Japanese hotel. He slid open the drawer and saw Rick’s watch, his phone, a pen and a small pad of paper but not a bible in sight.

And then: there were photo frames on top of the dresser.

“Mogami-san, I realise this is all very…” he struggled for a word that didn’t give away just how much he didn’t remember, “ _ different _ but would you mind giving me one of those sheets?”

_ Mogami-san _ ? Corn had never called her that before. And the only person with that face who ever called her that was… No. It couldn’t be.

“Mogami-san?” he said again and she realised she’d just been standing there, staring at him, an act that must have made him rather uncomfortable seeing as he was only wearing a pillow.

“T-turn around,” she stuttered and he turned his head away so she could peel something away from the tangle of linen around her body without worrying about accidently revealing herself. 

She kept the thicker, more covering duvet for herself and placed the sheet on the bed before turning around and offering him the same privacy.

She didn’t hear him get up. The next thing she knew, he was ghosting past her, the sheet gathered around his waist, on his way to the dresser. She followed him dumbly. After all, he was her only link to sanity right then -- although even that was tenuous. Was he really Corn? It was becoming less likely with every passing second but, if he wasn’t Corn, that only left one option and it was not an option she was willing to accept easily. 

Ren crouched down in from of the dresser, holding the sheet closed with one hand and using the other to turn the photo frames towards him. A picnic. A wrap party. The inside of an ice cream shop. Some landscape shot of the view from a lookout somewhere; jagged mountains and mist rolling through the valley. A wedding. 

And, everywhere he looked, he saw the same two faces smiling back at him. Sitting together on a checkered blanket at the picnic. Standing straight and formal and very close together in some official photo of them entering the wrap party together. The back of one of their heads standing further down the lookout. In each other’s arms at the wedding. Kissing. Arms around waists. Holding hands. Smiling. The occasional arm-touch.

“Mogami-san,” said Ren, giving up on pretending to know what was happening and more than a little surprised that his voice was actually still working, “this might sound crazy but… are we married?”

“What?”

Kyoko also dropped onto her knees before the photos. Tsuruga-san and, in what appeared to be later photos, the blonde haired, green eyed Tsuruga-san stood next to her or held her in his arms in nearly every one. Her eyes focused on one in particular. 

It was of a red-carpet event. She was wearing a silk dress so thin it looked like someone had drawn it on her skin and heels tall enough to make the height difference between the two of them look more endearing than ridiculous. They were half turned towards the camera, the flash reflecting off Kyoko’s shoes and dress and Tsuruga-san’s tie, his arm was around her waist and he held her firmly against his side as they kissed in that very clean but purposeful way that Kyoko had seen a hundred times when celebrity couples needed to confirm their relationships to the public. She’d kissed him. She’d kissed Tsuruga-san. In public! More importantly: he’d kissed her. 

And she couldn’t remember any of it. 

The photo held her attention for five seconds more before a hint of something white caught the corner of her eye. Tsuruga-san was right. It was their wedding. She looked closer, determined to find evidence of the scene being from some act they’d both been a part of. But there was nothing. It was their wedding. Their  _ wedding _ . Tsuruga-san held her by her waist as they stood on the steps of some building, crayon-green hills behind them and a snowstorm of confetti hanging in the air around them. She looked even closer at the photo because there was one part of it that seemed even more impossible than the rest.

Tsuruga-san was smiling. In fact, he might even be laughing. Not some fake gentlemanly laugh or the terrifying ‘you better have an explanation for this behaviour’ laugh. He actually looked… happy. Happy to be marrying her. 

She looked down at her left hand and, sure enough, there was the same silver ring from the photo, complete with the three stones embedded in it -- one large-ish blue one, the name of which she hadn’t a clue, and two smaller diamonds on either side of it. She liked it, she admitted to herself. It was modest and not so large it would get caught on her clothes. She could probably even wear tight gloves over it without tearing a hole in them.

Then, she looked from the ring to the man who had apparently given it to her. He was staring back at her, pupils dilated and mouth trembling ever so slightly. In an instant, Kyoko realised what the problem was: he didn’t remember either. He had no clue what was happening and was looking to her for answers. Answers she definitely didn’t have.

“Uh…” she said and Tsuruga-san sighed.

“Let’s sit down,” he said.

He turned back to the bed and looked at it for a moment, at all its terrifying but not wholly unwelcome implications, before he was overcome with guilt and started opening doors, looking for the one out of the room. He got an ensuite bathroom first try. Second try was a walk-in wardrobe and he put aside the need to sit down for the moment in favour of the need to not be naked.

The wardrobe was neatly arranged with his clothes on the left and Mogami-san’s on the right. The back wall was covered in a rack filled with both of their shoes. Ren grabbed some trackies and a hoodie before telling Mogami-san that he’d be getting changed in the bathroom and she was welcome to use either the wardrobe or the bedroom. He’d knock when he was finished so that he wouldn’t accidently catch her unawares. Then he slipped passed her, out of the room.

Kyoko only really heard half of what he said. She was too busy staring at her reflection in the full-length mirror she’d just spotted. She’d had an inkling when she saw the photos but she really was older than she remembered. She walked over and prodded her reflection in the face to be sure it wasn’t some sort of trick mirror. No, it was real. She was in her mid-twenties, if she had to guess. She must have permed her hair at some point in the past to make it so wavy and she’d let it return to its natural colour. She patted down the back of her head, smoothing out her bed hair, almost subconsciously as she stared into her own eyes. They seemed like the only thing that hadn’t changed in all those years she now saw in her looks.

Slowly it was sinking in: she was probably about twenty-five and she couldn’t remember anything from the last eight years. At some point in that time, she’d married her mentor and long-time heart torturer. At some point in that time, they’d kissed and, if the way they woke up was any indication, had s… s -- had  _ been intimate _ . At some point in that time, she’d become quite a well known actress if the photos on their dresser were anything to go by.

And she couldn’t remember any of it. 

Oh, God, what if they had children? She hadn’t seen any in the photos but that didn’t mean they didn’t exist. She’d have to look her children in the face and tell them she couldn’t remember who they were. She wouldn’t be able to lie to them. Not for long. Soon it would become obvious to them that their mummy had no idea who they were. Children were often far more perceptive than adults gave them credit for. Often far more perceptive in times when adults would rather they not be.

No, she’d just thought of an even worse situation: What if she was pregnant right then? Just the thought of it, of some foreign being sitting inside her, made her feel sick. She knew she shouldn’t feel like that. She should be glowing and happy and love the little foetus already -- everything that pregnant women are supposed to do. But she didn’t feel any of that at all. She might look twenty-five but she was really only seventeen. She’d just woken up next to a naked man for the first time in her life. Sure, she’d finally, reluctantly, admitted she loved him but she still felt dirty and grubby, like she’d lost all control and wasn’t herself anymore. If she was pregnant… If she was expected to bring a child into the world in such a situation where she couldn’t remember anything and didn’t even know who she was… Never before had she sympathised with her own mother to such an extent. 

Still, she held herself together. She found some underwear and a pair of soft pyjamas and put them on. She’d buttoned herself up to the top button before the first tear slipped free. And then the dam wall broke and she just sat down in front of the mirror and cried until she couldn’t cry any more. 

 

Meanwhile, Ren was standing in front of the mirror in the ensuite, staring himself in the face. His eyes were contact-free, as he’d suspected. What he hadn’t seen coming was his hair; free of dye of any kind. He was fairly certain it hadn’t just been dyed back to blonde but was his actual natural shade for the first time that he remembered in five years. Or was it closer to fifteen years? 

He’d certainly aged. There wasn’t anything remarkably different about his face. No wrinkles or sagging jowls -- he should only be about thirty by his estimation. There was just a hint of experience and age that sat upon his face like a mask. He plucked at his hair and wondered at this older him.

_ Did future me really think this style suited him? _

No wonder Mogami-san had thought he was Corn when he looked like this. But he’d given himself away already, hadn’t he? He hadn’t exactly done his usual fairy prince act. And, if he hadn’t outed himself already, those photos certainly had. He couldn’t lie this time even if he wanted to. Kyoko-chan might be naive and gullible but she definitely wasn’t stupid. 

He thought about her as he got dressed. He wasn’t sure if it just hadn’t hit him yet. He’d supposedly lost about ten years worth of memories and yet… he wasn’t particularly bothered. It just felt like a dream and he had to go along with it long enough to wake up. The only memories he found himself wishing he could remember were those related to her. Were they happy together? How had he told her his history the first time? Because it was obvious by her face that she didn’t understand what was going on, either. What face did she make when he asked her to marry him? Did she want children? Had she recovered enough by this time from the damage her mother and that bastard had done to her to actually consider starting a family with him? A small part of him wanted to remember what she’d looked like the night before, during whatever it was that they were doing to end up the way they had that morning. He shooed the thought away. This was an underage girl he was fantasising about. Except, she wasn’t. Not anymore. 

No, that didn’t make it okay. In fact, it probably made it worse. Taking advantage of her while she’s so confused would definitely get him a one way ticket directly to hell. 

He shook the thought from his mind and knocked on the bathroom door. When he didn’t hear her tell him to wait, he pushed the door open and stepped out into the bedroom. It was empty. He looked around for a moment -- after all, this was the girl who had a habit of hiding in corners when she was upset -- but the room really was empty.

That was when he heard it.

She was crying. No, she wasn’t just crying. She was sobbing. Hiccoughing sobs that seemed to rip up out of her chest against her will. She would sob for a while and then the sobbing would quiet down and there’d be silence for ten seconds or so before he heard a muffled scream -- like she was screaming into the floor -- and then the sobbing would start again.

Ren probably stood frozen for a full minute, confused and afraid, before he went to the wardrobe doors and knocked quietly. The sobbing immediately softened but Kyoko-chan didn’t reply. He slid the door open, slowly enough that she could shout and throw something at him if she were still getting changed. She didn’t move. She just sat on the floor, like she’d fallen and then didn’t have the energy to move, in front of the mirror, her fingers fisted in the carpet as she struggled to get her breathing back under control. 

Ren was at her side in two steps. He pulled her into his arms without a word and the two sat there, on the floor, as Kyoko cried the last of the hysteria out of her system and Ren felt like his heart was breaking over and over at the sound of it.

At last, it was silent. Ren thought for a moment that she’d cried herself to sleep but then she spoke.

“I can’t remember anything, Tsuruga-san,” she said.

“I know. I know, Kyoko-chan,” he replied.

“Why can’t I remember anything? What happened to me?”

“I don’t know but I’m the same. Don’t worry, I’m right here. We’ll be okay. We’ll work it out. Everything will be fine.”

Ren could feel the dream cracking and his own panic seeping through. This was real. This wasn’t a dream. He’d really woken up one morning missing years of his life. He’d woken up next to the girl of his dreams and he had no idea how he’d managed to win her over. Not to mention, she was breaking and he had no idea how to help her.

That’s right. This wasn’t a dream. This was his new reality.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please forgive the seemingly out of place flashback. I hate labelling my flashbacks with 'flashback' because it reads awkwardly so I considered italicising it but... yeah, obviously I didn't end up going with that plan. Hope it all still makes sense and that you enjoy!

 

Kyoko walked through TBM, pushing her Bo costume before her in a covered trolley. Hikaru-sempai walked beside her, as he had taken to doing on her trip to the laundry after Kimagure Rock. 

“You know,” said Kyoko, “You really don’t have to walk me every time, Sempai. I’m sure you have better things to be doing than escorting some newbie actress around TBM so she doesn’t get lost.”

“But I want to walk with you. I like walking with you,” replied Hikaru.

Kyoko looked at him like he was crazy for a moment before she stopped pushing the trolley and bowed deeply. 

“Thank you so much, Sempai. I know you are only doing this because you’re so kind and you’re worried about your kohai running into someone dangerous again but I can assure you that the dangerous person who pushed me down the stairs before has already been dealt with and this really isn’t necessary. I’ll be perfectly fine taking Bo for a wash by myself. I couldn’t possibly continue to inconvenience you like this.”

Hikaru felt himself slump a little and frowned. She had to be gently shooting him down. There was no way she could be this dense. 

He let out a small sound like a mix between a sigh and a groan and Kyoko looked up.

Just then, they both heard a snort of laughter and turned towards the sound.

Ren had witnessed the whole exchange and now walked down the corridor towards them, hurriedly putting his mask back on so that Hikaru would never know he’d just been laughed at by Tsuruga Ren. 

Kyoko, on the other hand, had absolutely no doubt as to where the sound had come from, though she was confused about its meaning. Still, she bowed and greeted him.

Hikaru was confused when Tsuruga Ren thanked him for looking after Kyoko-chan, heartbroken when he put his arm around her shoulder and asked her if she’d like a lift home and then defeated when the man looked up from Kyoko-chan’s face and smiled at him. No one can win against Tsuruga Ren. 

Meanwhile, Kyoko remained completely ignorant to the powerplay that was going on between the two men. She did think it was a little odd that Tsuruga-san would put his arm around her but he’d done odd things before so she let it go. And she was too busy trying to decline the offer of a lift home politely to notice Hikaru-sempai’s crestfallen face. She was still declining when Tsuruga-san started to lead her away and, before she knew it, they were standing beside his car and she finally realised all her declining had fallen on deaf ears. 

She climbed into the passenger seat of the car, defeated. No one can win against Tsuruga Ren.

“Where’s Yashiro-san?” she asked as they pulled out of the underground car-park.

“We’ve finished for the day and he said he’d take a taxi home,” said Ren, knowing his manager’s sudden decision to take a taxi was more than a little influenced by unexpectedly seeing Kyoko-chan in the halls of TBM.

For the most part, the car ride passed in the silence Ren’s ‘no talking in the car’ rule demanded but, here and there, when they stopped at traffic lights and the like, Kyoko retold her day. Ren’s attention kept getting swept away from the road by the way her eyes would shine when she talked about the praise she’d received that day and the criticisms the director had given her and how she thought her character would react in such-and-such a situation and what the character’s motivation was for saying a particular line and how that impacted on her intonation. What she’d struggled with and what she was proud of. Ren rolled his eyes at some of the particularly vague criticism the director had given her, the sort that was the most unhelpful and frustrating.

The lights changed to green and Kyoko fell silent again as Ren switched from the brake to the accelerator and the car started moving. And then the car was full of glass. Shards flew across the cabin, tearing at seats and skin. Something was coming through the passenger side window. Something metallic and exuding light. The car didn’t roll at first but it skidded and slid into the curb. Then it flipped. Onto its side. Onto the roof. Onto the side again. Then it stopped. It’s headlights beamed out straight and true across the now wrecked intersection. And the world seemed impossibly quiet.

Kyoko tried to swallow and couldn’t. She tried to move and couldn’t. She could only move her eyes. She rolled them in Ren’s direction. His head had cracked the glass of his window. His hands were propped against the dash as if he’d been bracing himself there before his muscles gave out. His eyes were closed. He wasn’t moving. 

Kyoko tried to swallow and still couldn’t. She didn’t want to look down and see her own state so she closed her eyes. 

She closed her eyes and the world fell away.

 

***

 

“So, you’re Father’s son, Hizuri Kuon?” said Kyoko.

They were sitting at the table in the dining room of what must be their home. Tsuruga-san had managed to find some tea among the plethora of cupboards and they both sat with heads bowed while he explained his appearance. 

“And Kuon is my fairy prince, Corn.” Kyoko’s hands held tightly to her still-warm mug, her one point of clarity in all her confusion. “And you didn’t tell me because of what happened with Rick-san, not because you didn’t trust me.”

“It sounds stupid when you put it like that but, yes,” said Ren, still not daring to meet her eyes.

“Okay. Anything else I should know?”

Ren did look up then. He was so tempted to tell her he loved her. That was something else she should know, considering they were somehow now married. But one look at her face told him that was not a good idea. Her eyes were glazed and she wasn’t blinking often enough. Her skin was frighteningly pale, her lips had gone almost blue. She seemed to be barely breathing. She was coping -- not very well but she  _ was  _ coping -- with all that had happened so far; the memory loss, the marriage, the reveal of his history. But one more tiny, little thing would likely break her again; something Ren was not willing to do. That and, with everything that had just happened, he was not feeling brave enough or selfish enough to foist that information on her just then. 

So he shook his head and stared back down into his empty mug.

“I’m Bo,” said Kyoko suddenly. “I just thought I should tell you. Make it even. Or… as even as it can be.”

Ren knew that, ordinarily, he’d be surprised -- maybe even a bit betrayed and hurt -- but he was exhausted and he already knew she was dense when it came to matters of love. He should have expected that he could practically confess everything to her and she wouldn’t suspect a thing. So he just nodded and kept staring into his mug.

“You’re not angry?” said Kyoko.

“Why would I be angry?”

“I lied to you.”

“Well, are you angry at me? I definitely lied to you more than you did to me.”

Kyoko thought about this for a minute or two before shaking her head. “No, I’m not angry.”

Ren swallowed but his throat still felt dry. “Are you… are you disappointed?”

“In you?”

“In Corn. In me. In my dad.”

Kyoko smiled and Ren felt some warmth return to his heart. 

“I’ll admit, I’m a bit sad that Corn isn’t really a fairy. But that doesn’t change everything he’s done for me. His stone still ate up my troubles for years. It doesn’t change everything you’ve done for me, either. I would never have become an actress, I would never have created Natsu, without you.” 

_ I wouldn’t be who I am now, without you _ , her heart added but she hushed it. That was one step too far.

“And I don’t understand why I’d be disappointed with Fa--Hizuri-san,” she finished.

“You can keep calling him Father. I’m pretty sure he’d cry if you stopped,” said Ren. Not to mention, if they really were married, he actually was her father now. “But he lied to you, too. He kept the lie going.”

The colour was coming back to Kyoko’s face, then. This was a topic she, though was not necessarily comfortable with, at least understood. 

“Tsuruga-san,” she said, though the name already felt wrong in her mouth, “I might be just a newbie actress but I’d like to think I at least understand why a stage name has to be protected.”

Ren looked at her for a long moment, at her determined eyes still red from crying and the stubborn set of her mouth and the new years that were already looking at home on her face, and then he smiled as well.

“Thank you,” he said at last and stood up. “More tea?”

Kyoko nodded and handed him her mug. 

When they had both settled back at the table, facing each other like they were at some sort of job interview, they started the next point of confusion.

“So,” said Ren, licking his lips nervously, “we’re married.”

Kyoko didn’t move, just let a small, “yes” slip passed her lips. Her brain was caught in a constant loop of ‘ _ I’m now Hizuri Kyoko. I’m now Hizuri Kyoko. I’m now Hizuri Kyoko’ _ . 

“What’s the last thing you remember?” he asked.

“TBM,” she said. “I’d been filming for Bo and then… and then you offered me a lift home and we were driving and then… did I ever make it home? I must have if I’m here now, right?”

Ren nodded. “That’s about where my memory drops out, too. Though I wasn’t sure before now whether we actually made it into the car or not.”

“How long has it been since then? How much are we missing?” 

Ren shrugged in that way that Kyoko hated and looked around for a newspaper or something but came up blank. He remembered seeing his phone in the bedside table but he was sure there’d be something closer to hand with the date. His eyes fell on something dark on the coffee table about three metres away. He stood up to retrieve it. Like he’d hoped, it was tablet -- not exactly the kind he was used to but, then again, he supposed technology had moved on in the last however many years. He finally found the lock button and the screen came to life.

It had a passcode. Ren swore. How could he know a passcode he didn’t even remember making? Then he realised he didn’t need to. There was the date already, laid out neatly beneath the time. 

Nine years. They’d lost nine years of their lives. 

Somehow seeing the date made it all sink in and Ren just sat there at the dining table in silence, catatonic and unseeing, staring blindly at the screen until it blacked out again.

“Tsuruga-san?” whispered Kyoko.

His eyes looked like some frightened animal when he slowly lifted them from the tablet to her face. Completely lost.

“I’m thirty,” he said. “I’m thirty. Where the hell did my twenties go?”

Kyoko hesitated for a moment. She remembered the way he’d held her as she’d cried, the way she’d felt so warm as her world tore apart at the seams. Then she reached across the table and clasped his hand in both of hers. She didn’t say anything. Just like he hadn’t then. They both just sat there in silence and waited for it to pass.

 

Twenty minutes later and they’d somehow gravitated to the couch. They sat together, hands clasped and heads bent, foreheads almost touching, in silence. The shock had passed. The grief of lost years was beginning to numb. But they still clung to each other, to the only thing they knew in this strange, new universe.

Then a phone rang and the rest of the world flooded in. They leapt apart, both flushing madly and making a great show of looking for the ringing phone. Kyoko found it first, on the kitchen bench, but she didn’t know what to do with it. In fact, neither of them were sure what to do with it. They just stared down at it in Kyoko’s palm as it rang itself out. Then it rang again and Ren made a conscious effort to try and work out how to answer it. He would have appreciated a more normal colour code; a red and green choice. Even a O/X choice would be more helpful. Instead he had yellow and purple options. Who knew which one was ‘receive call’? In the end, he just tapped some icon and hoped for the best.

“Ren?” came Yashiro’s voice from the device. “Where on earth are you? You were supposed to be on set fifteen minutes ago. The director’s somehow managing to be surprised, disappointed and defend you all at the same time.”

“Yashiro,” said Ren and nearly burst out in tears for something so normal as his schedule. 

“What’s wrong? You haven’t called me that for years.”

Ren looked at Kyoko. He would put the phone on speaker so she could listen too, if he could just work out how to use it.

“You should probably tell them I’m not going to make it, Yashiro. We’ve had a bit of an emergency,” he said.

“What kind of emergency? You’re not hurt are you? Is Kyoko-chan okay?”

“She’s fine. We’re both fine. But…” If he was honest with himself, he wasn’t entirely sure Yashiro would believe him if he told him the truth. But he couldn’t work as he was. He didn’t even know what he was working on, let alone the lines for the part. And he had a feeling his co-stars wouldn’t appreciate him forgetting their names.

“But?” prompted Yashiro.

“But,” said Ren, picking the only road his muddled brain could find, “we seem to have lost nine years of memory.”

Silence down the line. Kyoko chewed her lip worriedly beside him.

“What?”

“I don’t know how it happened but we woke up this morning with nine years worth of memories missing. Mogami-san was quite distressed to find me in her bed.” He tried to joke but he could feel his throat closing. The panic was coming back.

“‘Mogami-san’?” shouted Yashiro. Ren was sure his manager had just received a few strange looks from the rest of the staff. “Are you serious, Ren? You better not be fucking around right now.”

Ren blinked at the profanity but let it go. Nine years is a long time, he reminded himself, people change. 

“Right. Okay.” He could hear Yashiro trying to calm himself down. “Right. You stay there. I’m going to call the president because… well, because I have absolutely no idea what to do about this.”

Ren tried a laugh but it sounded just as toxic as his joke had been. “This sort of problem does seem right up his alley.”

“Don’t move. Someone will come and get you,” insisted Yashiro. “Until then… have a look around. See if you can work out enough to fool at least an LME driver and then… and then we’ll do something. Something…”

Ren agreed and hung up. Kyoko frowned up at him and he couldn’t stop himself from taking her hand, seeking comfort from her steady warmth again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again!  
> It's been a week and I am back. Can I just say: holy guacamole, this fandom is so strange in the best possible way! Usually you can sit there and pour your heart out in the notes, begging for a comment and still get nothing but here... Just, there's actual feedback! It's crazy! Is this just some Skip Beat fandom quirk? Where the readers are actually considerate of the authors? How rare! I don't even know how to say thank you but to say 'thank you'. It really means a lot.
> 
> I kind of empathised with Ren in this chapter because, as a fellow twenty-one year old, if I woke up tomorrow and my twenties were suddenly gone, I'd be pretty upset. I mean, they're supposed to be the best years of your life (not that I've found that yet but, hey, I've still got nine of them left) and he's just lost them forever. Kyoko had her freak out last chapter so she was definitely the one in control here.  
> And I'm in a bit of a weird spot with technology because this is set in the future, just not very far in the future. How far will technology have advanced in nine years? Will we still be using social media as we do now? Will Google's stupid-ass 'google glass' actually get off the ground? (God, I hope not, those things are dumb AF). Maybe everyone will actually think the apple watch is cool in nine years! It sounds ridiculous but who knows. They'll only be small differences but they'll be differences all the same.
> 
> I hope you all check back in next Sunday! Until then, toodle-oo! 
> 
> Ocean.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again we start with a bit of an awkward flashback. Sorry about that. There's one more in ch7 (so not for a while yet) and then we're free of them so just hang in there.

Yashiro paced back and forth in the private A & E waiting room. He walked to one end of room where a bin sat, overflowing with torn-out magazine pages and tear-stained tissues. He walked back to the other end where that plant sat, the plant that was either real or plastic and he couldn't decide which. He took pleasure in the feeling of his legs stretching over and over, taking longer strides than he would normally, and focused his mind on that feeling. He had to, otherwise his head would be filled with fear or the tsunami of inappropriate priorities. 

They were supposed to be on location at five that morning to get the sunrise shot. That was just four and half hours away. It’s supposed to be the turning point of the series where Ren’s character finds the resolve to throw everything he has away in order to do the morally right thing. And all Yashiro could think was that they were going to be late because Ren was still in surgery getting his head glued back together. 

Late! Of all the things to be worrying about right then, Yashiro had to worry that they were going to be late! 

He shook his head and focused back on the feeling of his legs stretching with every step. 

“Yashiro-kun, would you please sit down,” said the president, sitting on a blue plastic seat and looking exhausted in his elaborate Mayan garb. 

Yashiro looked at him like a startled rabbit. He’d forgotten there was anyone else in the waiting room with him but now that he looked around, there was the president and the couple from the Darumaya and Kotonami Kanae, just as worried as he was. Some had their heads in their hands. Kotonami-san was just staring blankly out into space, her face expressionless.

Yashiro dropped into a chair but he couldn’t sit still and his foot started tapping. Then his knee started bouncing. Then he started running his tongue against the back of his teeth for the sake of that ripping sound it made -- it was as close to white noise as he could get and he needed that. Anything to stop him thinking. Just when he’d popped back to his feet to continue pacing, the doors finally opened and a surgeon appeared with her hands clasped in front of her.

Yashiro listened with wide eyes. Cranial and femur fractures. Possible nerve damage. Broken ribs. Ruptured organs. Massive internal bleeding. Unresponsive.

_ Unresponsive _ . 

What did that mean? Were they dead? Both of them? The dead were unresponsive to everything. But that couldn’t be right. They had to be on location in three hours. Ren wasn’t allowed to be dead. And Ren wouldn’t be able to concentrate on showing the emotional subtleties that scene required if Kyoko-chan had just died, so she wasn’t allowed to die either. 

Wait, Yashiro and the others were being lead away into an ICU room. Ren and Kyoko-chan weren’t dead. If they were, the anxious loved ones would be being shown to the morgue. 

The surgeon stopped in front of two frosted glass doors. The nameplates read ‘Mogami-sama’ and ‘Hizuri-sama’. Yashiro barely had the energy to register the incongruence between reality and the names he’d expected them to show. He definitely didn’t register the president offering to pay all the expenses. The thought of money hadn’t even crossed his mind. The surgeon waved her ID over a little black box beside each door, the light on the box changed from red to green, and she pushed the doors open. Being a private and severely security-conscious man, Ren would be grateful to be in a room with card-swipe access only. Or so Yashiro thought.

He was ushered into Hizuri-sama’s room. And there was Ren; shaved completely bald to allow the surgeons access to his skull and somehow managing to make his almost two metre long body look small, swaddled in the blankets and hospital gown. 

Yashiro looked away from his charge’s cut and stitched-up face to the machines that gently whirred in the room. He only recognised two. The one that went beep was definitely some sort of heart monitor. And the one that looked like a plastic accordion in a tube was what was making Ren’s lungs fill with air. That’s all it was. That one machine was all that was keeping Tsuruga Ren breathing. 

 

***

 

Kyoko dropped Tsuruga-san’s hand and moved away from him as soon as they stepped back through the door into their apartment. She had absolutely no idea what had possessed him to marry her during those nine years they were missing but she was sure he was definitely regretting future-him’s life choices. Maybe there’d been some scandal and the only way to save her reputation and career was to marry her. She could see the dutiful and kind Tsuruga-sempai doing that. But that was just too sad. He’d shackled himself to a plain and boring woman out of kindness forever. 

Well, it didn’t technically have to be forever. 

There was such a thing as divorce. But they lived in the entertainment world so a break up would be more fuss than it was worth. Not to mention that, if he had married her to save her reputation, a divorce would undo anything that they had gained by the marriage. The end of the marriage would mean the end of her career and Tsuruga-san was too kind to do that to her.

She sighed and walked over to the TV. The president hadn’t been nearly as helpful as anyone had hoped. He’d just laughed for about five solid minutes until tears streamed down his face, said something about how at least now they were no longer the most boring couple he’d ever employed, and then gave them a massive stack of their own work to review. His idea was to just forget that they’d forgotten and learn everything from scratch again. There was even some footage and media coverage of red-carpet events thrown into the homework he’d given them. As well as interviews and a complete filmography for each of them. Yashiro had given Ren a new copy of the script for his current project, chances were he had forgotten where he’d put the old one. A woman in her forties with hair re-dyed black and an air of calm efficiency had done the same for Kyoko. Apparently, that was her manager for the last seven years, Akechi Nao-san. 

Kyoko dropped the pile of resources on the coffee table and then set about working out how to turn the TV on. She’d managed to get a keyboard to spring out before she gave up and asked Tsuruga-san to have a try. 

Ren didn’t have much more luck. He was beginning to have sympathy for his grandfather and regretted teasing him for his lack of technological literacy.

_ Oh, Grandpa in heaven, please forgive my prior rudeness. I now understand your plight.  _

It took them almost an hour but, eventually, they had the TV on  _ and  _ had worked out how to use the little chips the president had given them that supposedly contained almost 40 movies and box-sets of dramas they had appeared in, either together or separately, over the last nine years. 

Ren retrieved the pen and pad of paper from his bedside table drawer (but left his phone where it was. He’d quickly learned it no longer worked and could only wonder why he had bothered keeping it) and, together, they sat down and watched, taking notes along the way. They started with the red-carpet events -- premieres and wrap-parties and awards ceremonies -- and the interviews to get an idea of how they behaved as a married couple in public. There weren’t many of those videos and they soon moved on to the more recent series, since they were the most likely to come up in future interviews and conversation, then they just worked their way backwards in time. Their notes were filled with the names of their characters and the directors and producers they’d worked with, their co-stars and their co-star’s characters, the studios where they had been filmed when they could work it out, as well as the little acting techniques they must have picked up in the time that was nothing more than a giant blank in their memories. They trawled the ‘behind the scenes’ footage to pick up back-stage anecdotes they’d be expected to pull out when asked by interviewers and TV hosts. Anything and everything they might be expected to ‘remember’ about their past works. They watched for seven straight hours before Kyoko made them break for dinner. Then they switched to their current projects and read scripts for another five hours. Ren didn’t think he’d ever studied so hard since high school and he had definitely not done such intense character analysis since he left the US.

“This would be easier,” he said, “if I could see the footage of what I’d already filmed for this movie. I have no idea how I was acting this part until now.”

Kyoko hummed in agreement as she circled something in her script and added a note in the margin. In that way, she was lucky. Apparently she didn’t start filming on this project until the next week. Whereas Tsuruga-san was almost finished with his movie and expected to fly out to Borneo to film the final scenes in just three days. 

She set down her script on the coffee table and went into the kitchen to make herself yet another cup of coffee. She started one for Tsuruga-san as well since he had never refused a cup when she offered one in the last eleven hours they’d been studying. 

“Who’s your character?” she asked. 

“A journalist. Well, a foreign correspondent,” he replied. “He’s the secondary lead. His wife is the real main character.”

Kyoko set his mug down in front of him. “And what makes him so difficult? If you don’t mind discussing it with a mere kohai.”

“You’re not a mere kohai anymore. You’re my wife.” Ren paused to let the taste of the word settle on his tongue. He covered the pause by sipping at his coffee. “And even if you weren’t, I’d still be more than happy to discuss the character with you.”

Kyoko smiled but there was something of a manic glint in her eyes. The words ‘you’re my wife’ were still bouncing around inside her brain in a horrifically painful but delightful way. She had to think of this as a role. She wasn’t Mogami Kyoko -- or  _ Hizuri  _ Kyoko -- and she wasn’t really married to the man sitting across from her. She was just playing a part; ‘the wife of Tsuruga Ren’. There didn’t need to be feelings involved. 

“The problem is,” said Ren, completely oblivious to Kyoko’s internal conflict, “that he spends most of the movie being resolutely terrified. It’s just really hard to get a handle on who he is if he’s stuck in the same emotion the whole time.”

Kyoko sipped her coffee. “Why is he so afraid?”

Tsuruga-san took a deep breath and Kyoko could practically see him turning back the pages of the script in his head, looking for the beginning of the story.

“Well, it’s pretty simple,” he said at last. “Ushio, my character, believes he’s going to be killed but he doesn’t think his life is worth the price it would take to save him. He was covering the aftermath of a military coup in some country -- it’s never specified which one but it’s described like a fictionalised version of Indonesia -- when he’s abducted by an anarchist terrorist group. A ransom for his release is sent to his wife, Mao, who they believe will be able to put pressure on the Japanese government to stop supporting the new military regime of their government. Of course, Mao can’t do anything like that. She’s a successful journalist but she’s still just a journalist. So they torture Ushio, and he’s eventually killed by them.” 

Kyoko had put down her mug by then and shuffled forward so she was sitting right on the edge of the couch, her eyes shining with sympathetic tears for Mao, the wife who had to sit at home powerless while her husband was tortured and killed, and angry tears of moral outrage for Ushio who had to bear all the physical pain.

“And what happens then? How does it end?” she asked. 

Ren smiled at her expectant face. “I don’t know, I haven’t gotten there yet. My character’s dead by then anyway so it shouldn’t affect my portrayal as much as the rest of the story does. I’m leaving it until last.”

“Oh,” said Kyoko, disappointed. 

“Sorry,” said Ren.

“So, is it because he believes in the new military regime that Ushio-san is targeted by the terrorists?” 

“No, no, he thinks they’re a terrible idea that could only lead to a brutal dictatorship and a possible all out nuclear war,” said Ren.

“Well, then why is the Japanese government supporting them?”

Ren frowned and thought about this for a long time before it clicked and he looked up proudly. “It’s coal. Japan is still transitioning to renewable energy and one of the few places that still has significant deposits of coal is that fictional country where my character is. Japan needs that coal for at least another five years and, until then, they have to support whoever controls the coal.”

Kyoko shook her head. “That’s so complicated.”

“It is,” said Ren. “They’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. If they withdraw support, tens of thousands of Japanese might die when the coal runs out. But if they keep supporting them, the world might be annihilated in a nuclear war.”

“And Ushio-san chooses to let tens of thousands of Japanese die?” asked Kyoko. 

Ren frowned. That was right. By choosing to not support the military regime, his character had, essentially, decided to let tens of thousands, possibly even hundreds of thousands, of his countrymen die for the sake of preserving the greatest number of human lives possible. Ushio was a journalist. It was his job to know the facts. There was no way he wouldn’t know what was going to happen if Japan lost the favour of the military regime. So he was an intelligent, moral man but with emotionless, logical priorities. 

Well, it was a start. And it at least explained his willingness to die for the cause.

Ren smiled the smile that seemed to burn Kyoko’s skin. “Thank you, Kyoko-chan,” he said.

“No problem,” she tried to reply but it came out as nothing more than a garbled mess and she picked up her own script again, pretending to be busy.

“Well?” said Tsuruga-san and she looked up from the page again. She hadn’t realised it yet but she’d been holding her script upside down.

“Pardon?” she asked.

“Who are you this time?”

“Oh!” she said, turning the script back the right way around and flipping back several pages. “I’m a young woman working for a politician who uncovers a scandal that goes all the way to the top!”

Ren laughed. “Do you think it’s a coincidence that we’re both doing political thrillers? Or could we be being branded as a set? I know the president would love that.”

Kyoko tilted her head to the side as she processed what he’d just said. Ren could see the exact moment that understanding clicked in her brain because she flushed deep, deep red and pulled her script up over her face. The married couple that always came as a pair. There was something strangely intimate about their work being synchronised like that.

“P-put it in the notes,” she said before adding hastily, “but put a question mark at the end!”

Ren laughed again but did as she asked.

_ ‘Husband and wife come as a set?’ _

 

Kyoko and Ren stopped reading at midnight. They needed to go to bed soon. Kyoko had a press-conference, a script-reading and an interview the next day and Ren would have to resume filming for his movie. They both had early starts. But going to bed meant sharing a bed. They’d discovered, in their frantic search of the apartment for clues about their life, that there was only one bed in their home. The spare room had been turned into a study, with soundproofing on the walls so they could practice lines late into the night without waking each other up. 

Ren offered to take the couch but the image Kyoko’s brain conjured of him trying to fit all 190cm of his body comfortably on it made her laugh out loud. Kyoko then offered to take the couch but Ren rejected the idea even before she’d finished her sentence. So, they just sat together, watching late night news to try and get a grasp on the way their characters would speak. 

“Tsuruga-san?” Kyoko’s sleepy voice was whisper-soft in the flickering light from the TV. 

“Yes?”

“Do Ushio-san and Mao-san have any children?”

Ren stiffened. Of course he knew this wasn’t exclusively about his role. This was about the sudden marriage they’d both found themselves in. This was about Kyoko’s own fears and insecurities. This was about  _ her  _ mother and the irreparable scar she’d left on Kyoko’s heart. 

He swallowed. “Yes. They have a two-year-old son.” 

In the movie, the child had very little substance, from a characterisation point of view. He was the personification of innocence in a world that was otherwise dirty and corrupt. He was just a plot device to make the grey world look even darker by the power of juxtaposition. But he knew Kyoko wouldn’t see it like that. Everyone was human to her.

She tucked her legs up on the couch, folded her arms around the armrest and laid her head in the crook of her elbow. Ren could see she was only minutes from sleep.

“Then,” she murmured, “he loses his daddy.”

“Yes,” said Ren, “I suppose he does.” He’d never really thought about what happened to the child after his character leaves the story. After all, the kid was just a plot device.

“What does Mao-san do?”

“I don’t know, Kyoko-chan. I still haven’t read that far.”

“Does she still raise him happily? Does he become a great person like his father?”

“I don’t know, Kyoko-chan,” he murmured again.

“I hope she does,” Kyoko whispered as sleep finally claimed her. “I hope he grows up happy and loved…”

“I know he does, Kyoko-chan. He becomes the most amazing, beautiful person anyone has ever known,” Ren whispered to her sleeping form.

Then he lifted her into his arms and carried her off to bed. He’d just lay down a couple of blankets in the study, or something, and sleep there. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I completely forgot what this chapter had in it so I went back to read it on Friday. I sort of ended up reading the whole thing again. This is definitely one of those fics that are better to marathon than post chapter by chapter but... if I do that, you have to put up with my intermittent writing pace -- which would not be fun for either of us. 
> 
> I hope I haven't disappointed too many people by not having the actual interaction with the president and Yashiro. I lay in bed staring at the ceiling for about twenty minutes considering it but it felt like it slowed the plot too early on in the story for it to work properly.  
> If that makes sense...  
> It could just be my own weird idea of logic.
> 
> Once again we have a bit of 'future tech that's not too future' and the struggles that brings with it. And the beginning of the huge amount of acting that will eventually be in this fic. You get to meet Ushio -- one of the few character I named before I looked up what the name meant. It just sort of popped into my head and I went with it. And no, I haven't been watching Clannad recently. But I like Ushio. He's a bit emotionally abnormal but, hey, that's what I like about him.
> 
> Hopefully everything's still on track and I'll see you all next Sunday :)  
> Ocean.


	4. Chapter 4

“I still don’t think you should go,” said Mao, stirring a bubbling pot on the stove, her back to her husband. 

Ushio looked up from delicately placing items into a child’s bento with a pair of chopsticks but didn’t say anything.

“I mean,” continued Mao, “what is there for you to even say? ‘Yes, the Government has fallen. Yes, the military has assumed control. Yes, there will probably be some violent backlash by angry supporters of the previous regime within the next few weeks.’ Everyone knows what to expect, Ushio-kun. You don’t need to go all the way out there when the whole thing could be covered in a thirty second story by a news anchor in-studio.”

Ushio frowned, offended, but went back to arranging the contents of his son’s bento to look exactly like a smiling panda.

“You’re not getting the whole story, Mao-san,” he said calmly. “It’s not just about what’s happening  _ right now _ . It’s about what this new government is going to do for the region. There’s always something bigger to look at. You know that!”

“Yes, and that ‘something bigger’ is going to get you killed,” snapped Mao. 

Then regret flooded her face. She closed her eyes and sighed, turned off the stove and turned to face Ushio. “Ushio-kun,” she said but he didn’t look up from the bento. The panda’s ear just wouldn’t sit right. “Ushio-kun,” she said again, this time pulling him around by his elbow to face her. “I’m asking you not to go.”

Ushio was conflicted. On one hand, he truly believed this was a story that had to be covered properly and not just swept under the carpet by an in-studio piece that every viewer would dismiss as ‘some other country’s problem’. But, on the other, his wife, the woman he loved more than anyone else in the world, was practically begging him to stay with her where it was safe.

He turned fully to face her, one hand on her waist and the other gently rubbing her upper arm.

“Mao-san,” he started but was interrupted by the sound of pattering, bare feet and they both turned towards a toddler doing that wiggly run that toddlers do through the doorway.

“Papa!” shouted the toddler and promptly tripped on nothing and fell flat on his face. 

“Oh no!” cooed Ushio as the boy began to bawl. He scooped him up into his arms and held the crying child. “Yes, isn’t it exciting?” he said to the toddler as he bounced him on his hip. “Papa’s home again!”

Mao watched the exchange with a frown on her face. “Ushio-kun…”

Ushio frowned and walked back over to where he had left his wife in favour of their screaming child. “I know, Honey, I know but… I just gotta tell this story.”

She glared back at him. 

“My plane leaves on Thursday. Please, until then, can’t we just be happy to be together?” he said. 

Mao gave a sickly sweet smile and stroked the child’s head. 

“Yes, isn’t it exciting, Akio? Papa’s home again,” she fixed Ushio with a withering look, “for a whole four days.”

 

“ _ Cut! _ ” shouted the director and the cast gave a sigh of relief at being let go from the tense domestic environment. But the director just ran his hand over his stubbly chin for a moment before he shook his head.

“No,” he said. “It’s still not right. Chiyo-san,” he said, addressing Mao’s actress, “you’re still doing that thing. I know that this makes Ushio look like the primary protagonist but you can’t resort to ‘ignorant damsel in distress’ to lower Mao’s credibility. Otherwise it looks like she’s a victim of circumstance, forced into the role because there was no man to take her place. We need the viewers to understand that Mao would take on this role even if it wasn’t Ushio who was captured. The fact that he’s her husband and they parted on bad terms just increases the emotional investment of our audience. 

“Mao is Ushio’s sempai in the business. She’s got more experience and has a reputation of being a cut-throat journalist. She’s confident in her ideas. She’s not genuinely ignorant. She’s deliberately misunderstanding in order to convince her husband to stay where it’s safe. She’s just concerned and this is the only way she thinks she can persuade him not to go.” The director pivoted a little in his chair, “and Tsuruga-kun,” Ren looked up at his name, “why do you look so uncomfortable the whole time?”

There was a wave of laughter throughout the staff and Ren forced a smile, too, despite his shame at being called out.

“This is your wife and child! This is your kitchen at home! You don’t have to look like you think someone is going to turn up and tell you to get out at any moment.”

“Honestly, Director, that’s what usually happens when I set foot in a kitchen,” said Ren and the staff laughed again. Ren thanked the stars that Kyoko had mentioned his appalling cooking skills in one of the interviews they’d watched the night before and it was now apparently common knowledge that he didn’t know his way around his own kitchen. 

The director shook his head with a smile. “Then, pretend it’s some other room. You’re in the living room with Kyoko-san just having a conversation. You’ve made a decision and she’s not happy with it.” He cocked his head to the side and then grinned. “I’m sure that’s happened at some point.”

Ren laughed along with the rest of the staff because he knew that’s what he was supposed to do. He nodded his head and murmured, “you bet it has,” because he knew that’s what he was supposed to do. All the while thinking that he would give his right arm for the chance to do something so domestic and couple-like with Kyoko. 

“Alright!” said the director, clapping his hands. “One more time from the top.”

 

***

 

Kyoko sat in the passenger seat of Akechi-san’s car. At first she’d gone to sit in the back, like she’d seen other talents do, but even looking at that cold expanse of leather made her feel like she was stepping into a world she didn’t belong in. As if she was expecting Akechi-san to chauffeur her around like she was some rich young lady.

She wondered if she’d sat in the back seat before she lost her memories. 

It felt like her tasks for that day grew exponentially harder as the day went on. She’d already been to the script-reading. That had been the easiest task. She knew script-readings, understood how they worked.

Although, she had been surprised when some of the younger actresses, girls who she felt were about her age but were, in fact, almost ten years younger, had told her she was their inspiration for getting into show business. She’d just blinked for a moment and then grinned wildly, saying, “Really? Thank you.” 

Before, she might have launched into a spiel about how Tsuruga-san had been  _ her  _ inspiration. But now? Now that she was supposedly married to him? That just seemed a bit strange. So, instead, she’d engaged the girls in conversation about her earliest projects, the ones she actually remembered doing, and asked what about them they had found most inspiring. She felt like a narcissist the whole time. 

Right then, she was on her way to the press-conference. They were announcing the release date for a movie she’d acted in years ago that'd had its premiere delayed. The production company had gone bankrupt and it took them years to find someone else to buy the film. 

She wasn’t particularly worried about the press-conference. The press would be limited to questions about the movie and Kyoko had already read through the script (it was an  _ Alice in Wonderland _ -esque story about a girl who fell into a mirror. She’d filmed it when she was only just twenty) and talked to Akechi-san about how she got along with the other cast members. And if someone asked something she wasn’t comfortable with answering she could always pass it onto someone else or say, “I’m only answering questions about  _ Capture in the Glass  _ today. Sorry.”

No, it was the interview in the evening she was worried about. There were no restrictions on what the interviewer might ask. She could be forced to talk about some project she worked on six years ago -- from the period that she and Tsuruga-san had never reached in their recap of their careers the night before. She could be asked about Tsuruga-san! God, what would she say if they asked her about him?

 

Akechi Nao watched her charge’s face change rapidly in the seat beside her. It went from worry to acceptance to pride to confusion to worry again to indifference and, finally, to blind panic. 

“Kyoko-chan, are you alright?” she had to finally ask.

“Yes! Yes, I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be fine?” Kyoko replied. 

“You just look like you’re worrying about something,” said Nao. 

Kyoko slumped and Nao thought she could actually see the gloom rising off her like heat. 

“It’s just…” said Kyoko. “What if they ask me about Tsu-- I mean, R-Ren-san?”

She was obviously trying out the way she’d heard herself call him in her research the night before. 

“They won’t ask about him at the press-conference, don’t worry. It’s already been two years since you got married. The media has moved onto other things.”

_ Two years…  _ thought Kyoko.  _ We got married when I was twenty-four. That’s eight years after we first met… six and a half years after the blank in my memory began. What on earth happened in that time? _

“But,” said Kyoko, forcing the thoughts from her head, “what about at the interview this evening? I mean, he’s  _ the  _ Tsuruga Ren. He’s bound to come up at some point.”

Nao laughed and Kyoko marvelled at the way it transformed her face. She suddenly looked five years younger. Shining eyes and glossy skin. 

“Kyoko-chan,” said Nao, “right now you are  _ the  _ Kyoko-san. Have some confidence in yourself. A lot has changed in the last nine years. I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn't come up at all and, if he does, it will only be in passing.”

“But he’s also  _ the  _ Hizuri Kuon! Surely that counts for something, too?”

Nao raised her eyebrows at the question. “Did you tell you about that himself?”

“He had to. Because of… circumstances,” mumbled Kyoko.

“Well, rest assured, Kyoko-chan, that the media has moved on from that as well. Besides, he’s still using his old stage name. Even though everyone knows his real one now.”

Kyoko barely caught Akechi-san’s answer. Her brain was once again caught up in the ‘circumstances’ that lead to the identity reveal. She felt that ‘punched in the gut’ feeling of sickness again at just the thought that they might have… in fact, they probably did have… and the mere possibility that it might result in… 

She wondered if she’d wanted children before she lost her memories. 

“Akechi-san?” she whispered.

Nao hummed to show she was paying attention. Though, really, more than half of her attention was focused on the busy intersection she was trying to navigate. 

“Do you think you could…” said Kyoko.

“Do I think I could what, Kyoko-chan?”

“Do you think you could buy me a pregnancy test?” The question was barely audible but Nao still almost swerved into the wrong lane when she heard it.

“A what?” said squeaked, waving away the angry honks from her fellow motorists.

Kyoko didn’t say anything.

“You’re not… are you?” asked Nao, not daring to say that potentially-career-destroying word.

“I’m just scared,” admitted Kyoko.

Nao took one hand off the wheel to rub across her forehead. She felt like this conversation had just given her three massive forehead wrinkles. Maybe a few crows feet to match. 

“Alright,” she said at last. “They usually only reliable if you’re three weeks or more along so I’ll get a few and you can stagger them out. We can’t have you going into a store for them yourself. The media would have a field day. I should tell you though, you and Kuon-san weren’t trying for a baby, as far as I’m aware, so this is just for your peace of mind.”

“Thank you, Akechi-san,” said Kyoko.

“You’re welcome. Now you should get back to reviewing that script. We’re almost there and we don’t want you forgetting any of your co-stars’ names.”

“That  _ would  _ be embarrassing, wouldn’t it?” said Kyoko.

 

***

 

For the first time that she remembered, with the exception of that time during  _ Dark Moon  _ when he’d struggled with his character, Kyoko finished work later than Tsuruga-san. The lights were on and the atmosphere had lost a lot of the heaviness that had plagued the apartment for the last two days. She couldn’t smell food and the kitchen still looked spotless so she assumed Tsuruga-san hadn’t eaten yet. She slipped out of her shoes and placed them neatly on the rack beside the door, the rack that held four other pairs of shoes that matched her tastes exactly and she didn’t remember buying. 

“I’m home,” she called tentatively. It somehow felt very wrong to say those words when she knew who would reply.

“Welcome home,” came Tsuruga-san’s voice from where Kyoko knew the television was around the corner. “I’m in the living room.”

She ducked into the study and left her bag full of work-related items on the desk before she followed the voice around into the living room. Tsuruga-san was on the couch, his brow furrowed in concentration and their pad of notes in his lap. He was watching some detective drama. He wasn’t on the screen right then but, Kyoko knew, he was in the drama somewhere. 

“You started without me,” she said. 

He just made some sound of agreement, his eyes glued to the screen. Either this was a particularly thrilling drama or he’d had a day that reinforced how badly he needed his memory back.

“Have you eaten?” asked Kyoko, already knowing the answer. 

He finally looked away from the TV, a guilty expression on his face. 

Kyoko sighed. “Stay there. I’ll go make something.”

 

They ate in front of the TV. Just a light soup and fried vegetables. It was quite late, after all. For a long time, neither of them spoke except the occasional comment on their own acting that had to go down in the notes. At last, as Ren was stacking their dirty plates together, Kyoko spoke.

“How was your day?” she said, still feeling like it wasn’t her place to ask.

“I think the director expects more of me than I’m capable of delivering right now,” said Ren. “I didn’t realise there were so many different shades to my character.”

Kyoko smiled sadly in understanding. This was definitely going to be a problem they ran into a lot.

“What about you?” he asked.

“The interviewer asked me if she could expect any little Hizuris in the near future. I didn’t know what to tell her.”

Ren looked at her in sympathy. If it were the day before, he might have pulled her into his arms again. But she wasn’t crying anymore. She didn’t need him to hold her. As much as he’d like to. 

“And some girls told me I was their inspiration,” she added.

“ _ Damn right _ ,” said Ren in English and Kyoko had to double take. It was still hard consolidating Hizuri Kuon and Tsuruga Ren in her head, even with his blonde hair and green eyes. “It just shows that they have good taste.”

“It was weird,” said Kyoko. “Surreal. Especially when I can’t remember ever doing anything inspirational.”

“You’re my inspiration and I only remember what you’d achieved up until you were seventeen,” he said.

Kyoko just stared at him for a moment before she frowned. “Don’t tease me, Tsuruga-san,” she said. 

“I’m not. I’m being serious.”

“Stop it!” she said. 

Then she scooped up the dirty dishes and left the room. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm a bit of a mess right now. I should have finished uni for the year on Friday but, me being me, I procrastinated like nothing else and I'm still going on my assessment, two days late. I have a story I should be working on right now for one class. I haven't even looked at the essay questions for another class. Basically, I'm screwed but still marching on.  
> Anyway, so what's actually happening here is I'm taking a break from that hell to come over here and give you the next chapter. I really hope you like it. 
> 
> So, how did you find the chap? They've finally left the apartment! How exciting. We have the first bit of acting. I hope it worked okay. The mental image of Ren cooing at a toddler is somehow hilarious. There's also a bit of setting up for the -- what is it? the third arc? When I haven't even really gotten into the first one... yeah, not sure if that's the best idea.  
> Sorry I'm being a bit... inarticulate in this AN. I feel like my brain is coming out my ears. You're probably lucky I wrote this weeks ago...
> 
> I'll see you all next week when I'll definitely be free. I'll either have finished all my assessment or failed all my classes. Either way, that's freedom for the moment. 
> 
> 'till next Sunday,  
> Ocean.
> 
> [edit: now that my brain is mostly working again, I remembered I wanted to tell you that Mao's line 'I'm asking you not to go' is directly lifted from episode 2 of the BBC's 2004 period drama, North and South, which happens to be my favourite period drama of all time (it's like P&P but with a subplot), so feel free to read it with a heavy northern accent :)]


	5. Chapter 5

Kyoko could go to sleep wherever she liked, she’d still wake up in bed. She’d tried to force Tsuruga-san to take the bed by sleeping on the couch. He’d carried her to bed in the night and slept on his pile of blankets in the study. She’d tried to steal his pile of blankets so he couldn’t sleep there. But he’d just picked her up and carried her to bed and took the pile for himself. He was flying out to Borneo the next day. He needed to sleep properly. So Kyoko finally gave in and presented him with an ultimatum. She would keep falling asleep in strange places until he slept on the bed. That is: if he slept in their bed, she would too. 

Ren realised the implications of her ultimatum as soon as she said it. Much sooner than she realised them herself. But she was so determined when she said it, her arms crossed over her chest and her lips in a pout, that he’d also immediately given in. Which was why, when his alarm went off at 4am, he found himself coiled around Kyoko’s warm, soft body. He allowed himself ten seconds -- twenty seconds to enjoy the feeling before he got up. 

Kyoko woke when she felt her pillow moving beneath her head and latched onto it. She opened her eyes when she heard her pillow swear at having fingernails dug into its flesh.

She mumbled an apology, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. How could her brain be so active, screaming and freaking out that she’d just slept with Tsuruga-san, when her body was still so tired?

Ren had to cross his arms and clasp his hands on his elbows to stop himself from climbing back into bed with her. 

“Sorry,” he whispered instead, “I didn’t mean to wake you. Go back to sleep. I have to head out to the airport. I’ll see you in two weeks.”

Instead of having the desired effect, this seemed to wake Kyoko up entirely. She sprung up in bed, her pyjamas distractingly dishevelled. 

“Airport,” she said, still more asleep than she’d like, and got out of bed.

She stumbled into the closet and appeared what felt like seconds later wearing a short, grey, woolen dress with long sleeves and a emerald green sash belted around her waist. She’d chosen a long, silver necklace and small green earrings to go with it. 

Ren took one look at her and frowned.

“Airport,” said Kyoko again.

“Are you planning on coming with me to Borneo?” joked Ren, still glaring at the huge expanse of her legs that were visible as if they’d personally offended him. He couldn’t know that she had picked the outfit with the image of Tsuruga Ren’s Wife in mind.

Kyoko shook her head as if coming out of a trance.

“No,” she said, “just to the airport.”

“Why? It’s four in the morning. And you have work today.”

“You’re leaving the country for two weeks. If I’m your wife, people will expect me to be there.”

It was perhaps the most dispassionate response he could have gotten.

He sighed. “By that logic, you’ll probably be obliged to kiss me goodbye as well,” he said, hoping to scare her back to sleep where she belonged.

He watched as Kyoko froze, defeated for a moment by her own logic. Then she swallowed, took a deep breath and stood even straighter than usual.

“I can do it,” she said. 

_ No you can’t!  _ cried her heart.  _ That’s just unfair! _

She closed her ears to its complaints. Who cares if the first kiss she remembers sharing with Tsuruga Ren is an act? She must employ the actor’s rule of the heart.

“You’ll be cold,” warned Ren, thinking of the pre-dawn air in a last ditch attempt to get her to stay. 

Kyoko just reached down to pinch her knee and stretch her skin further than skin should ever be stretched.

“Skin colour, woolen stockings,” she said. “With my coat, I’ll be just fine.”

Ren sighed. “Just let me take a shower and then we can leave,” he said.

Kyoko grinned in victory before heading back into the closet. Tsuruga Ren’s Wife would wear the best make-up money could buy.

 

***

 

Although twenty-six year old Kyoko could legally drive, she couldn’t drive at all in reality. She didn't know how. She didn’t even remember taking the lessons let alone getting her licence. Ren offered to drive but they couldn’t leave his car in a parking lot for two weeks, there'd be hell to pay if someone recognised it. So the two took a taxi out to the the airport. 

They barely spoke to the driver, except to give directions where needed, and sat with their knees touching, holding hands and with their heads bent towards each other in the habit they had developed in public. It was somewhat reminiscent of how they’d acted as the Heel siblings and it was probably for this reason alone that Kyoko could bare to sit so intimately with her sempai without screaming.

It was only when they had already arrived and Ren leant in the passenger window to pay, that the driver recognised his guests. Still, his face didn’t even twitch. Plenty of famous people caught taxis. He just filed the story away to tell his daughter when he got home. She’d always loved Kyoko-san. 

 

Even disguised in sunglasses and hats, Ren and Kyoko attracted attention as they made their way through the airport. Ren was unusually tall and Kyoko was trying to project an aura of ‘casually glamorous’ that she felt Tsuruga Ren’s Wife might have. They attracted so much attention that, though the couple didn’t notice, about one out of every three people recognised them. Phones appeared and secret photos were taken. One teenage girl encouraged another teenage girl to go up and talk to them, though neither of them actually took action. 

They checked in Ren’s luggage and went through security and customs, the officer balking a little when he saw Ren’s passport, and then they just sat in the private lounge, waiting for the plane to come in. 

Ren was tired. He would have barely slept as it was, having to get up at four in the morning. And telling himself he could sleep on the plane didn’t make him feel any less tired  _ right then _ . What made it worse, though, was that he’d slept next to Kyoko the night before. It had probably taken him twice as long as usual to fall asleep. And, even when he got to sleep, his body kept waking him up periodically as if telling him that sleeping when he had her in his arms was a waste. 

He was so tired he felt he couldn’t be blamed for teasing her a little so he lifted his hand and cupped her cheek in his palm. 

“You still look sleepy,” he said, stroking his thumb along her cheekbone. “You’ll have bags under your eyes if you’re not careful.”

Kyoko was at war with herself.

_ Move _ , she told her body.  _ Act. _

_ But it’s that face he used to take out Momose-san during the  _ Dark Moon  _ acting test! _

_ Move! Tsuruga Ren’s Wife would be used to such a face! _

At last she did move. She leant into his palm with her own smile, even reaching up to touch the back of his hand with her fingertips. 

“I’m not going to see you for weeks,” she whispered as if it were a secret only the two of them were allowed to know. “I want to be with you as long as I can.”

Ren wanted to believe the look in her eyes. He wanted to believe the tone of her voice. But he knew how good an actress she was. He knew it better than anyone else. And he also knew she was treating this memory loss like some sort of acting test. So he fought back his hope, knocked his forehead against hers and just let it rest there.

“I’ll call you,” he said.

“Every day,” she told him. 

“Every day,” he promised.

They stayed that way for thirty seconds or so as the rest of the cast started to arrive. 

“Tsuruga?” someone called and Ren was forced to tear his face away from hers. 

He looked up to find Murasame walking towards him. Yashiro had told him that they’d become closer after it was revealed Ren had been Cain Heel, and then closer again after he’d married Kyoko until the point where Yashiro was almost convinced they were friends. He knew in his head that he had nothing to fear from Murasame. He’d already won the girl -- he’d married her! He’d even kept up the ‘friends’ act on set with the other actor because he knew it would seem out of place if he suddenly started acting suspicious towards him. But with Kyoko sitting right there, it was hard not to shield her from his ‘friend’ with his body and keep her hidden.

“Ah!” said Murasame. “Kyoko-chan is here as well. Good morning.”

Kyoko stood and bowed politely. Ren wished her dress wasn’t such a loose fit so it didn’t fall wide open when she did so. 

“Good morning, Murasame-san. Long time no see,” she said. 

“Not since last month’s Elan D’or Awards, I think,” added Murasame, pointedly looking anywhere but her chest. 

“Morning, Murasame,” said Ren, trying to look as tired as he could so that the other man might leave a little sooner. 

Despite Ren’s intentions, Kyoko then engaged Murasame in conversation. 

“I didn’t know you were acting in  _ Convictions _ , Murasame-san?” she said.

Murasame’s eyebrows shot straight up into his hairline and he turned to Ren. “You never mentioned it?”

Ren shrugged. “It never came up.”

“What the hell do you two talk about if not work?” he said.

“We do talk about work,” insisted Kyoko.

Ren wished she’d stop dropping him in hot water with her replies. “It just doesn’t feel fair to talk about our co-workers when they’re not there,” he finished desperately. 

Thankfully, Murasame laughed. “Well, feel relieved knowing I don’t mind you talking about me in the slightest.” He winked at Kyoko and Ren bit his tongue to stop himself reacting. “Just so long as they’re all good things.”

Kyoko laughed politely and Ren allowed himself to put his arm around her waist. Nothing more. Just enough to sedate the beast inside him.

“So, who do you play?” Kyoko asked.

Murasame jerked his thumb in Ren’s direction. “I’m this one’s best friend, best man at his wedding and everything, but my character gets relegated to babysitting duties towards the end of the film while Mao-chan goes off and saves the day.”

“Does she really save the day, though? I mean,” Kyoko looked around her conspiratorially before whispering the rest of her sentence, “doesn’t Ren-san’s character get killed?”

Murasame smiled. “Ah, that is true.”

“But I think Ushio would prefer it if Mao abandoned him if it meant she could save the rest of the world,” added Ren. 

“‘Sacrifice, duty and the strongest convictions of the human heart!’” Murasame quoted their director theatrically. 

Ren smiled. He had to admit, it was hard to dislike Murasame when he wasn’t flirting with someone else’s wife. Unintentional as the flirting may be, or not. 

Mao’s actress, Nakahara Chiyo, had looked up at Murasame’s loud exclamation to find the small group gathered around Tsuruga-san. She looked from Murasame who was as ‘effortlessly cool’ as he always was, though still with that faint smell of someone who got up two hours early to style his hair, to Tsuruga-san who was actually smiling widely for once, to the third member of their group. She was small and petite but with that sort of stringy muscularity that made women look taller than they were. Chiyo spent a good twenty seconds staring at the other woman’s calves jealously before she even thought to work out who she was. She wasn’t part of the cast, she’d remember a woman with such enviable calves. She had to be someone’s relative. It was only then that she noticed Tsuruga-san’s arm around the woman’s waist. 

She must be Kyoko-san. 

But that didn’t make any sense. She didn’t look anything like she had in  _ Dark Moon  _ or  _ Concrete Jungle  _ or  _ My Home is Yours  _ or any of the other works Chiyo knew her from. Still, if she wasn’t Kyoko-san, who else could she be? Was Tsuruga-san cheating on his wife blatantly in public? That didn't really seem like him. 

Just then, another man joined the group. He wore glasses and looked a little frazzled as if he’d run all the way through the airport, through the many layers of security, to the lounge. Chiyo immediately recognised him as Tsuruga-san’s manager, though he did seem uncharacteristically late. In truth, Yashiro had accidently checked the time without thinking on his phone during the night and killed it dead, leaving him with no alarm and causing him to oversleep.

Chiyo walked over to the group, too, her heels clacking on the polished tiles. 

Murasame heard her coming and shot Ren a look that said ‘be nice’.

Ren replied with his own look that said, ‘I’m always nice’.

Murasame’s face looked skeptical before he said, “emmental cheese,” out loud, much to the confusion of Yashiro who had just arrived.

Kyoko watched the almost entirely silent exchange with a grimace. She supposed it was hard to change someone’s opinion of you when they first met you as someone so obviously violent. 

Chiyo arrived with a smile, Murasame taking a step over to let her into the circle, and introductions were made.

“Nakahara-san, good morning,” said Ren with a gentlemanly smile.

“Good morning, Tsuruga-san,” replied Chiyo just as icily, she wasn’t going to let someone who was already married continue to hold the title of ‘co-star killer’.

“I don’t think you’ve met my wife, Kyoko, have you, Nakahara-san? Kyoko, this is Nakahara Chiyo-san who plays Mao.”

Chiyo schooled her expression so that none of the surprise she felt showed on her face. It  _ was  _ Kyoko-san. That woman must have a face made of plasticine to be so versatile. 

Kyoko bowed, suddenly glad that she’d spent the last three days endlessly watching current dramas to catch up on the memories she’d lost. “It’s nice to meet you, Nakahara-san. I loved you in  _ White Wall _ .”

“You watched that?” said Chiyo, a little in awe that someone would remember that little known drama and the names of the people who actually acted in it. Though it happened to be the work she was most proud of.

Kyoko nodded. Really, it was just the first thing she could think of that the other woman had been in.

“Thank you,” said Chiyo. “I was just thinking how jealous I was of your versatility. You're really amazingly talented. You can play anybody. So trust me when I say: thank you, that means a lot.”

Kyoko smiled, genuinely glad to have made someone happy, just as the cast’s flight was called for boarding. She felt Tsuruga-san’s arm tighten a little around her waist, perfectly acting his reluctance to let her go. 

The other actors slowly started picking up luggage and heading towards the gate. Tsuruga-san turned Kyoko around in his arms so that they were facing each other.

“I’ll see you in two weeks,” he said, his eyes flicking all over her face as if he were trying to memorise it. (He was.)

“Two weeks,” Kyoko echoed. 

“I’ll miss you.”

“You have to keep your promise. One call a day.”

“At least.” He smiled.

Kyoko rolled her eyes with a smile like she was used to this doting husband that had suddenly appeared at the airport. She reached up to smooth his collar flat where it had bunched up under the strap of his bag. And then, just like they did it all the time, she stood on her toes and gently pulled him down by the back of his neck until their lips touched. Gently, chastely. Definitely ‘see you soon’ not ‘goodbye forever’. They kissed twice like this. The first that Kyoko initiated and the second that Ren stole as she was pulling away. 

Then Ren pulled his bag a little higher on his shoulder and headed towards the gate. He looked back as a flight attendant checked his boarding pass to see Kyoko gently smiling at him. She gave a small wave and he waved back, then he was gone, into the tunnel corridor that lead to his plane. 

Murasame fell into step beside him as they walked down the noisy corridor.

“It’s almost sad how much you love your wife,” he said.

Ren was grinning hazily. She’d kissed him! Sure, it was an act but who cared? There’d actually been some lip to lip contact. She’d kissed him! 

So, it was in a state of half euphoria that he turned to Murasame and said, “Well, she is my everything.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again! Yes, I am finally done with uni for the year (and I somehow managed to get those two assignments in so, with any luck, I haven't failed -- I can say goodbye to my credit average, though...) and I am free! Unfortunately, that doesn't actually mean more frequent updates for you, though. Normally, it would mean that I could spend the next week up to my elbows in this fic, get it done and then release a new chapter every few days as I edited them. But I'm experiencing some rather annoying technical problems right now. My laptop kind of died. I had my brother-in-law look at it, since he's a tech guy of some sort but he was like, 'yeah, I don't do Windows' so... I'm still stuck since I have no money to take it to a real Windows tech guy. I'm actually posting this hurriedly from my parents' office while my mum's out shopping -- not really a reliable method. 
> 
> Also, I was thinking about maybe getting a beta-reader for this fic? Since (1) I've never had one and I feel like it's probably a good idea for someone to read through this mess and tell me if it makes any sense and (2) I'm kind of worried about the plot progression and pacing of the later chapters. So, if you're interested, message me or leave a comment or something along those lines and we can work out how this would work (once my laptop is fixed which could be a long time from now...). I feel like the easiest way would be a shared google doc... 
> 
> Anyway, enough about that. The chapter! Let's talk about that. First up: the Elan D'or awards are real but I couldn't really pin down when they happen so, I actually have no idea what time of year this is set. For some reason November sounds right, which makes this set in December which means Christmas should be coming and there is absolutely no room in this plot for a Christmas side story... so, yeah, that's out. I only really chose it because the name sounds impressive. Also, Murasame is surprisingly hard to write. He's just so angry all the time in canon so writing him not-angry is weirdly difficult. And Ren's off to Borneo! What's this distance going to do for the two of them? Finally, what did you think about the kiss? Was it awkward? Was it out of place?
> 
> I think that's about it. Sorry for all this scheduling/tech mess. I promise I'll still be back next Sunday with the next chapter (I'll probably just have to steal my parents' office again). Until then,  
> Ocean.


	6. Chapter 6

Kyoko covered her face with her hands and rolled from one side of the bed to the other. She’d kissed him! She’d actually kissed him! She didn’t know whether to be happy or mortified and so her body just fluctuated rapidly from one to the other until she was flushed all over and could barely breathe. Good God, the man was some sort of acting monster! To be able to pull out that sort of shy reluctance to leave her like he did. And the face he’d made! She’d felt all the grudge left within her shrivel up and die at the sight of it.

Kyoko groaned again and resumed rolling back and forth on her bed. Except it wasn’t just her bed, it was both of theirs and she’s  _ kissed  _ Tsuruga Ren! How would she ever look him in the eye again?

The noise she was making then was indecipherable. It was perfectly split between horrified groan at her own presumptuousness and high pitched squeal as the part of her that still believed in love struggled to be let free. The noise was so loud that Kyoko didn’t hear her phone until the last two notes of her message tone. 

Her rolling and the noise suddenly stopped as she rolled out of bed in her surprise and hit the floor. 

She reached up and slid her phone off her bedside table. She’d had to buy a new one because she couldn’t remember the passcode for her old one and every time she looked at the chunk of aluminium and glass, she couldn’t help feeling angry at the waste of money. It seemed stupid to buy a whole new phone just because she couldn’t remember one password. Still, being easily contactable was a necessity for her career so Kyoko had relented.

She unlocked the phone and opened her emails.

 

**From: Mooookoooo-saaannn!!**

**My train comes in at 1:14pm. You said you wanted to talk?**

**P.S You got snapped by the paps at the airport this morning. Are you alright?**

 

Moko-san! She’d completely forgotten about Moko-san! How did that happen? She’d temporarily forgotten about her best friend. And now, she realised, her best friend had absolutely no idea that Kyoko had forgotten nine years of her life. 

Wait, what had she said about the paparazzi? There were photos? But that wouldn’t be a bad thing, right? She was just a wife seeing her husband off at the airport. That was normal. That was expected of her. 

All the same, she decided to quickly google her name on her phone to see what came up. 

There, in the first result, was a news article titled ‘ _ Japan’s Power Couple Together Even in the Morning! _ ’ timestamped 6:47am. The press sure moved fast. 

Kyoko stared at the title for a moment. It didn't make sense. Wasn't it more likely for a married couple to be together in the morning? After all, they'd be sleeping in the same place. She shook her head. It had to be some innuendo she didn't understand. She made a mental note to stop thinking about it. She didn't want to understand. Instead, she tapped on the link and the article loaded. 

Two large photos of her and Tsuruga-san filled the top half of the page. One of them walking through the airport, hand in hand, and the other was of the kiss in the lounge. But that was a private lounge. One reserved for the cast and crew of  _ Convictions _ . Which meant that someone from that group of people, an actor or a crew member or someone’s family, had taken that photo and sold it to the media in less than two hours. Two hours. They couldn’t even wait that long. 

She scanned the text. Something about this possibly being a media stunt to disprove rumours of Tsuruga-san having an affair and how this increased the speculation that Kyoko was pregnant with a secret baby. It was all incredibly embarrassing, she could only read a few sentences at a time before she had to bash her head against something in violent mortification, but Kyoko couldn’t see anything particularly damning. She read the article again, more comprehensively this time, and tried to remain professional, looking for anything potentially career-damaging for either of them. But there was nothing. Especially since they were already married. She tried to think about how the article would read if it was about someone not from show biz. 

‘ _ Woman sees her husband off at the airport as he leaves the country for work _ ’ didn’t really seem newsworthy. 

She quickly sent a message to Akechi-san to let her know about the article just in case she’d missed something horrifying and then went back to wallowing in her own embarrassment. Not only had she  _ kissed  _ Tsuruga Ren but now the whole country had seen her do it, too! 

She completely forgot to reply to Kanae’s email.

 

***

 

Ushio was thrown down, still blindfolded, and landed sprawled on the floor of the cabin. The cabin was old, made of rotten wood with the rainforest peeking through cracks in the floor and vines invading through the holes in the walls. The anarchists who’d snatched him from the main street in broad daylight just hours before, ripped the blindfold from his face. Ushio just had time to glance around the room and notice the deck chair sitting on the uneven ground in front of a crude home-video set up before they threw something into his lap. 

A newspaper. A newspaper in Japanese. He recognised it instantly. It was one of the biggest publications in the country.

“This is Mao-san’s paper,” he whispered, as if trying to make himself believe it. “You know who I am.” He turned to glare at his captors. “ **You know me!** ” he shouted at them in their own language. “ **You chose me on purpose! You kidnapped me specifically! Why? What do you want?** ”

The anarchists didn’t reply. 

There was the sound of four distinct, nearby gunshots and Ushio’s eyes flew open in understanding. His film crew.

Perhaps he should be grateful they wanted him specifically. 

The terrorists hauled him up by his armpits and dropped him into the chair.

“ **Read this** ,” said one of them, thrusting a single, grubby sheet of paper into Ushio’s chest.

Ushio took the paper and read it quickly. He knew right then that he was never getting out of there alive.

He shook his head. “ **No** .” 

There was a clatter in the shabby cabin as six weapons were cocked at once.

“ **Read it!** ” insisted the terrorist. 

“ **I won’t** ,” said Ushio. “ **Look, I know what you’re trying to achieve here but this is not going to** \--” The terrorist backhanded him across the face. 

“ **Read it or you die** .”

Ushio sighed and looked down at the piece of paper again. Their demands could never be met. Mao-san didn’t have the authority or the resources to pull it off. They were going to beat him, torture him for a few days -- maybe a few months if he was unlucky -- and then he would be met by a bullet through the brain, just like the rest of his crew. 

“ **Address the video to your lovely wife and her fancy newspaper** ,” said the man.

Ushio gritted his teeth but said nothing. At last, he took a deep breath, let it out again and nodded. 

The man who seemed to be the leader of the terrorists nodded at the man beside the camera who then pressed a button and a little red light began blinking on and off. The camera was on. They were recording. Ushio stared at the light for thirty solid seconds before he opened his mouth and spoke. 

“Good afternoon, Mao-san,” he said, eerily cheerful considering his situation. “Or maybe it’s morning right now. Either way, hello. I seem to have gotten myself into a spot of bother.” He was sweating bullets and, despite his words, the fear was clear on his face. “These lovely gentlemen around me have a message they’d like me to read but I won’t. I’m not going to --” 

The leader backhanded Ushio again. He spat a mouthful of blood out onto the floor.

“ **English!** ” shouted the leader.

Ushio wiped his still-tied hands on his khakis and tried again. He knew Mao would never see the part his captors couldn’t screen for hidden messages. Not that his message had been particularly hidden.

“ _ \-- they want me to use English so I can’t say anything tricky. So, hello,  _ Mao-san _. How are you? Are you healthy? What about  _ Akio _? Tell him I love him, won’t you? He won’t understand me like this so you have to say it for me. Tell him… tell him ‘Hey  _ Aki-kun _. What games did you play today? Did you know, Papa loves you and when I come home, we can - _ -” 

It was hard to tell what flew across the screen, it was so blurred. But one end of it looked like the barrel of a gun so it must have been the butt of one of the semi-automatic weapons the men crowded around him held, that had just smashed into Ushio’s face. The words in a guttural language that were shouted at him translated as ‘Just follow the script!’ Ushio fell out of frame with the blow and, when he crawled back onto his chair and into it again, his lip was split and blood ran down his chin. 

Still, all he said was, “ _ Tell him that,  _ Mao-san _. Just tell him I love him. I’m sorry, Honey. You were right. Don’t tell  _ Aki-kun  _ but I don’t think I’m coming home. So just tell him I love him and… and please know how much I love you. I’m sorry _ .”

The butt of the gun came down again but, this time, Ushio didn’t climb back up off the ground.

 

“ _ Cut! _ ” shouted the director. “Brilliant, Tsuruga-kun, brilliant. I’m actually in tears right now.” 

The man who’d played the terrorist who’d kept cracking a gun across his skull, a friendly but slightly ditzy Australian called Toby, reached down and helped Ren up. In an attempt to avoid making anyone too angry,  _ Convictions  _ was going to great pains to not identify the country at the centre of the movie. The actors who played the anarchists were a hodgepodge of ethnicities and the ‘guttural language’ that was supposedly their native tongue was really just carefully crafted gibberish. 

“ _ Thanks man _ ,” said Ren.

“ _ Your English is amazing, by the way, _ ” said Toby. 

Toby, like a lot of the additional cast, only spoke English and Ren had become something of an unofficial translator, relaying messages between the cast and the director. He’d even helped the scriptwriters with grammar when they’d come to him asking for advice, despite never having finished his American education. 

“Ah,” said Ren and pulled up the corner of his black wig to reveal the blonde hair underneath. “ _ I’m half American. I grew up in LA. _ ”

Toby laughed. “ _ Well, now it all makes sense! _ ”

“ _ Yeah _ ,” said Ren, “ _ Half American, quarter Russian and quarter Japanese. I’m a man of the world _ .”

Once upon a time, he would never have admitted that for anything, let alone turned it into a joke. Maybe thirty-year-old Kuon was braver than Ren had given him credit for.

Toby laughed again. “ _I’d never heard someone speak such unaccented English as their second language so that explains a lot. Though, I guess it had an American accent on it. But a lot of people speak English as their second language with a bit of an American accent so I hadn’t really… sorry, I’m rambling, aren’t I? I do that sometimes._ ”

“ _ Happens to the best of us _ .  _ Although perhaps I should work on putting a bit of a Japanese accent on my English. It makes sense that I wouldn’t speak with one but it’s illogical that Ushio wouldn’t _ ,” said Ren, putting one hand on Toby’s back and leading him away from the set. “ _ Come on, we should get off the set so the crew can fix it up for the next shot. We’re on break anyway and I have a very great desire to call my wife after that last scene. _ ”

“ _ I’m sure _ ,” said Toby with a smile.

 

Ren checked with the the director and Yashiro whether he would be needed any time soon and, when he was given the all clear, he climbed to the highest point he could find in the surrounding Borneo rainforest to see if he could get some phone signal. When he finally found some, halfway up a tree, he called Kyoko like he’d promised he would. It was already their second day of filming and he’d said ‘every day’.

She picked up on the third ring.

“Hello?”

“Kyoko? Good morning,” said Ren. 

“Good morning, Tsuruga-san,” she replied.

Ren frowned. There was something in her voice that didn’t sound right. “Are you okay?” he said.

“I’m fine!” she insisted in that way that made Ren sure she wasn’t fine. He just sat there, silently pressuring her, until she went on. “It’s just that, after your call yesterday, I found a gossip article. Someone got some photos of us at the airport.”

“Are you alright? You’re not hurt, are you?”

“I’m fine!” said Kyoko again and Ren’s heart stung with the lie. “It didn’t say anything of substance. The whole article basically boiled down to: ‘these two people are still alive’.”

Ren’s frown deepened. Even silly articles like that could be hurtful. It might cause some renewed interest in them as a couple, make the media track down their home and hound Kyoko until they got something of more value. Like the fact that they were both missing years worth of memories. 

He didn’t say any of that, though. He didn’t want to worry her with something that might not even happen.

“But you’re still upset,” he said finally.

Kyoko didn’t reply for a long time and, when she did, it was mumbled so Ren couldn’t make it out.

“Can you say that again? I don’t have very strong signal where I am and it’s hard to hear.”

“It’s just… embarrassing,” she said.

And that was the crux of it. It  _ was  _ embarrassing. That was the problem with stupid, inconsequential gossip articles: they didn’t say anything of worth and the only purpose they served was to make people’s private lives not private anymore. They were embarrassing and, because that was all they were, apparently no one had any right to complain.

“I know, Kyoko-chan,” he said softly. “I know it’s not nice. I wish you didn’t have to go through that but that’s just how the entertainment world works. It seems stupid to wish the world was anything except what it is but I do. I wish it were different. If I could…” he paused. He was about to be completely honest and wasn’t sure if it was a good idea. But he just swallowed down his fear and went on. Wasn’t thirty-year-old Kuon supposed to be braver than twenty-one-year-old Ren? “If I could, I would give anything to save you from that. I would give anything to make you feel safe and loved.”

Then he waited. There was silence for a long time, so long that he pulled the phone away from his ear to check that the signal hadn’t dropped out entirely. 

And then she spoke.

“You don’t have to,” she said.

“But I want to,” he replied, clinging onto his fleeing courage with his fingernails. 

He could practically hear her shaking her head. “No, you don’t have to. Just those words are enough.”

Ren smiled.

“Thank you, Tsuruga-san,” said Kyoko. 

Ren went to say something else but, just then, he heard Toby’s voice calling for him. They must be about to resume filming. 

“You’re welcome but I have to go now, Kyoko-chan,” he said into the phone, the regret thick in his voice. “We’re about to start the next scene.”

“That’s okay. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, Tsuruga-san.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow. Until then,” he said, “stay safe.”

“Ren!” Toby’s voice was still coming through the trees, Ren could hear the multitude of rainforest animals escaping from the noise. “ _ Where are you, mate?” _

“Buh-bye, Kyoko-chan. I love you.” Then he hung up and swung out of the tree onto the mossy, moist ground. 

As soon as his boots met solid earth, he realised what he’d just said. 

“ _ Shit _ !” said Ren, staring down at the locked, dark screened phone in his hand just as Toby stumbled into the clearing. “I’ve really done it now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm back again! Still posting from my parents' office, though... I managed to fix my laptop for about three minutes before it died again. My friend has a friend who has a friend who might be able to fix it for free. But that's pretty unlikely to happen, given the number of degrees of separation, the fact that it's only a 'might' and both me and my friend are terrible at actually getting things done. 
> 
> I'm going to admit now that I'd actually forgotten about Kanae until this point in the fic. And as soon as I remembered I was like, 'oh, damn, I should probably get on that.' There's some effort here, on my part, to get a bit closer to canon!Kyoko but I don't know how successful it was.   
> The ‘Woman sees her husband off at the airport...’ line is vague reference to something I only half-remember. It was something either JJ Field or Sam Claflin said... I think it might have been Sam Claflin. I have watched so many press junkets as research for the later parts of this fic that it's not even funny.  
> Toby is my little self-insert character. There has to be one in every fic or else I'd end up projecting onto the main cast.   
> With the 1/2 American, 1/4 Russian, 1/4 Japanese thing: I know a lot of people have Ren as 1/2 Japanese, 1/4 US, 1/4 Rus but... I have another one of my vague recollections. This one of Hizuri Kuu being at least partially American? Besides, this is a far more likely scenario, genetically, if he ended up with blonde hair and green eyes. Just saying.  
> And then, bam! How did you like the ending? Too soon? Too out of the blue? Too... I don't know. Just let me know what you think. What's going to happen after this accidental honesty?
> 
> I'm going to go now. I think I've finally moved passed the massive block that I have in my other multi-chap fic so I might go work on that for a bit. I'll see you all next week (where I'll probably still be in the office...),  
> Ocean.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here is that last (currently) awkward flashback. Now we're free of them. At least until I decide another one is necessary.

Seventeen year old Kanae was used to the hospital process by then. She arrived around lunchtime every three days and headed straight for reception. Things were a little different, given the public profile of who she was coming to see, not to mention the scandal that had grown up around the accident. She had to take off her sunglasses and present a photo ID to the receptionist so she could be cross checked against a list of approved visitors. She watched as the lady behind the desk put a little note next to her name with the date and time of her visit and noticed with a bitter taste in her mouth that the space next to ‘Mogami Saena’ was completely blank. That woman knew where her daughter was, hooked up to life support in one of the best hospitals in Tokyo, she just hadn’t thought it worth her time to visit. She probably thought it was all the same when Kyoko would never know she wasn’t there.

Then the lady gave her a visitor’s pass with a chip built in so she could scan it for entrance to Kyoko’s room and Kanae left the desk and that disappointing blank space next to her friend’s mother’s name behind. 

 

Kyoko’s room was quiet as it always was. The walls were thick in this hospital and almost soundproof so the only sound was the steady beep of the ECG monitor. Though, there was a new sound that week. A gentle, whirring hiss and Kanae looked around for its source. She found it on Kyoko’s face. A transparent, plastic mask covered her nose and mouth, fogging and then clearing in a rhythm that echoed the beeping constancy of her heart rate. From the mask, a tube stretched into a machine with some sort of plastic concertina inside. The concertina stretched and the hissing noise rose in pitch. Then it compressed and the noise went lower. Suddenly, Kanae realised what it was and felt her heart sink.

Kyoko was still breathing by herself three days ago. She was getting worse. 

 

***

 

Half an hour had passed since Tsuruga-san had hung up and Kyoko still sat at their dining table with her phone pressed to her ear, not moving, only breathing enough to keep herself alive. The words went around and around and around in her head.

I love you. I  _ love  _ you. I love  _ you. I love you! _

It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. And, in some sunken part of her heart, Kyoko didn’t want it to be real. 

Of course, he hadn’t meant it like that. He was American, after all. He probably signed off like that when he was talking to his mum. How embarrassing for him! He’d mistaken her for his mother! Good thing she hadn’t taken that phrase at face value. Then she would have been equally embarrassed. 

Something in her twinged in pain at the realisation but she stubbornly ignored it. It was ridiculous to think that  _ the  _ Tsuruga Ren telling her he loved her was anything but a mistake. Maybe he’d said it because the rest of the cast was around. Maybe he felt like he had to say it according to his role. 

Her ear was starting to feel bruised from holding her phone against it for so long and Kyoko took that to be a good sign. The feeling was coming back to her extremities. Then her phone chimed with a message and Kyoko thought she’d go deaf. That was the last time she held it directly against her ear when it rang.

 

**From: Akechi-san**

**I’m just leaving home now and will be there to pick you up in half an hour. Don’t forget there’s a costume fitting and makeup trial for Kihara Kanon at 4pm today so you shouldn’t put on much makeup when you leave the house. Being considerate to the hair and makeup team is never a bad idea.**

 

Work? Oh God! Work! Kyoko didn’t notice her phone’s message tone chime again as she left it on the table and raced out of the room to get ready. 

 

***

 

Ren stared at the phone in his hand. It felt heavy and useless and the panic that was grabbing hold of his heart kept telling him to fling it on the ground. Break it. Maybe that would reverse the damage. He stared back up into the tree he’d jumped out of. He should climb back up, find that pocket of reception and call her back. Make up some excuse. Anything but let her know the truth. He shouldn’t tell her. Even more so now that they were married. She had such a strong sense of duty and obligation, she’d stay with him no matter how uncomfortable he made her feel. Tying her to him with a marriage neither of them remember being involved with was such a coward’s way of keeping her with him when she would, no doubt, want to run as far from him as she could if she knew how he felt about her. 

“ _ Are you okay,  _ Ren?” asked Toby, watching his co-worker stare at his phone like it was a snake and then up into a tropical tree wistfully. 

Ren suddenly realised he wasn’t alone. 

“ _ Huh _ ?” he said. “ _ Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. _ ”

“ _ You sure _ ?” 

“ _ Of course _ .”

Toby looked at him skeptically for a moment before he shrugged. “ _ Alright, if you say so, _ ” he said. “ _ Anyway, I was sent to find you. You’re needed on set. The director’s just about ready to start the next scene. _ ”

Ren clasped Toby on the shoulder briefly as he passed him, carefully reapplying the mask that hid all his true emotions. “ _ Thanks. We better get back, then.” _

Ren choked down his panic and put the finishing touches on his professional smile. He was pretty sure he’d just ruined his marriage by telling his wife he loved her.

 

***

 

Twenty-six year old Kotonami Kanae checked her phone again for the umpteenth time as she left the train station. Honestly, that girl. She asks to meet up and then she just goes into total radio silence. Kanae had sent her a message through three separate messaging apps before she stopped herself. She didn’t want to look too needy. Instead she settled for checking her phone every ten seconds, waiting for a reply. 

She’d been out of Tokyo for the last week and a half, filming. Her current project was a period drama where she played Tsunoda Shigeko, a girl whose family had lost considerable distinction during the Meiji Restoration and had made it her life’s mission to re-climb the ranks of society to where she belonged. Her father was no help, he was a drunken slob who barely knew what was happening half the time. Her mother was dead and her brother was far too busy spending as much money as he could to help his sister regain the pride their family had once carried. Then Shigeko meets an old, commoner woman -- a woman who’d lost her noble rank just months before she came of age. They become friends and Shigeko slowly comes to realise that she doesn’t need a noble title in order to be happy. 

Kanae had actually been tentatively approached for the part when the story was still in its early drafts. Then the narrative role of the old woman had been performed by a handsome young man and Shigeko gave up on nobility for the sake of love. But Kanae didn’t like that. It felt frivolous and stupid for such a determined young woman to sacrifice everything she had previously believed for the sake of a man. 

So she turned the role down. She had other offers at the time anyway. 

It came back onto her table four months later under a different title. Apparently, the previous draft had been ultimately thrown out by the producer. 

There was still a strong love story that ran through the plot. There was still a handsome young man who encouraged Shigeko to see marriage as an opportunity for love (a character Kanae was sure the president of LME would adore) rather than social climbing. But, where Shigeko had before been encouraged to change who she was by love, in the newer scripts she was encouraged to  _ accept  _ love by gaining a sense of self-worth and the knowledge that she was her own person beyond her social rank. The old woman taught Shigeko self esteem built up from within rather than self esteem given to her by other people. It was only a small difference but it was a crucial one to Shigeko’s character. 

At first, Kanae had still been reluctant to accept the role. She felt it could too easily turn into a moral tale of ‘know where you belong and don’t try to climb above your station’ but she’d talked to the director and he’d had similar ideas so she’d decided to accept it. And that was how she’d managed to be out of Tokyo when all the drama of the last few days had happened.

She’d been at the most northern tip of Honshu. The location scouts had found an old house there that was perfect for one of the socialite party scenes and they’d been filming almost continuously in order to finish before their lease on the house ran out.

Kanae checked her phone again. Still nothing. She clicked her tongue, turned around and went back into the train station. She’d just have to drop by and demand to know why she was being blanked by her best friend.

 

When Kyoko came home that night, she found Moko-san sitting at a low table in the lobby of her apartment building, wearing bug-eyed sunglasses to hide her face and sipping some brightly coloured cocktail while she flipped through three different job offers. She looked different to when Kyoko had last seen her. But, then again, when she had last seen her, they’d both been seventeen. 

Moko-san hadn’t changed as much as Kyoko had physically. She still wore her hair long and had her willowy figure. The main difference was in the atmosphere she carried. It had gone from the ‘glamourous’ air she’d had at seventeen to one Kyoko could only describe as ‘sexy’. It was subtle but enough to remind her that time really had passed.

Kyoko stood there, observing for a moment. Then she launched herself at her friend. 

Kanae ducked the small torpedo and ignored the strange stares that the cry of “Moko-san!” had brought in their direction. After being best friends for over a decade, she was used to it already. 

Kyoko hit the ground and rolled neatly back to her feet before glomping Moko from behind. 

“Moko-san!” she cried. “I’ve missed you!”

“Jeez! Get off me already! Obviously, you didn’t miss me enough to reply to my messages.”

“Well, there was a lot going on,” said Kyoko.

Kanae raised an eyebrow at her suspiciously. “Aren’t you still technically between jobs? You don’t start filming for  _ Cross the Floor _ until Monday.”

“How did you know? Are you psychic?”

“You told me. I couldn’t get you to stop telling me.” 

“Right. Of course I did.” Kyoko shuffled awkwardly and Kanae’s suspicions that something else was going on grew. “Do you want to come upstairs?”

“Well, I didn’t take bloody public transport halfway across the city just to sit in the lobby. Jeez…”

Kyoko grinned and practically pulled Kanae over to the elevators.

 

***

 

“So, let me get this right,” said Kanae, glaring at Kyoko from across the table. “You just woke up one morning, thinking you were seventeen and everything was still right with the world, then you found out you were actually twenty-six and you still haven’t managed to regain the memories of those nine years you’re missing?”

Kyoko nodded mutely. 

“Well…” Kanae blew out her lungful of air in exasperation. “Have you told Kuon-san? Wait -- you do know who I mean when I say Kuon-san, don’t you?”

“He explained everything again.”

“Oh good. So, have you told him?”

Kyoko scratched the back of her neck awkwardly.

“Oh, jeez, you haven’t told him, have you?” said Kanae in disbelief. “You’ve just been pretending to be fine this whole time, haven’t you?”

“No, no! He knows. It’s just that… well, Tsuruga-san doesn’t remember anything either. We’re both in the dark.”

Kanae blinked in shock. “I haven’t heard you call him like that for a very long time.”

Kyoko gave a weak smile.

“Are you sure he doesn’t remember?” asked Kanae. “He is an actor, you know. He could just be pretending to forget to make you feel better about losing your memories.”

Kyoko thought about that for a minute or two. To be honest, that possibility hadn’t even occurred to her. “I don’t think so,” she said at last. “He asked me what was happening before I even said anything that might make him think I didn’t remember. And besides, when someone looks at you, confused in the morning, your first thought doesn’t tend to be ‘oh, they’ve lost their memories of the last nine years.’”

Kanae shrugged. “Fair enough. So what have you been doing to try and get them back? How did you even lose them in the first place?”

“No one knows how we lost them,” said Kyoko. “And the president didn’t say to do anything to get them back. We’ve just been studying like mad to relearn the last nine years in a few days.”

Kanae noted the pile of data chips on their coffee table and nodded. “I can see that. But, Kyoko, haven’t you ever thought of, I don’t know, going to see a doctor or something? You’ve got massive retrograde amnesia and no one knows why.”

“Would that be okay?” asked Kyoko quietly.

“Having amnesia? Absolutely not.”

“No, I mean, would it be okay going to see a doctor? If this got out, it would mean the end of our careers.”

Kanae looked at her friend intensely for a minute. She was honestly choosing to let a potentially serious medical condition go without treatment for the sake of preserving her career. There was professional and then there was just insane. 

But she didn’t say that. 

“There is such thing as doctor-patient confidentiality. And there’s probably a clinic associated with LME with extra-rigorous security screening. It wouldn’t get out,” she said instead.

“But there are people in the waiting room.”

“Get a private waiting room.”

“What if the doctor mentions to their child that they met Tsuruga Ren. Then the child would know that Tsuruga-san had gone to the doctor for some reason. They would tell their friends at school, the friends would tell their parents and then there’d be some rumour started about how Tsuruga-san has chlamydia or something.” The worst part was that Kyoko looked entirely serious while she outlined this ridiculous scenario.

“First of all, that’s not going to happen,” said Kanae. “Celebrities go to the doctor all the time. Even famous people need check-ups. Secondly, even if it did happen: rumours are rumours. We get them in this industry whether we like them or not and a stupid rumour about Tsuruga Ren having chlamydia would die down just as quickly as any other baseless lie the media machine churns out.”

“So… what should I do?” asked Kyoko.

“Go to the doctor already, jeez! Go and make sure you haven’t had a brain hemorrhage or something.”

Kyoko launch herself at Moko again, latching her arms around her. “Thank you, Moko-san! You always give the best advice!”

“Yeah, yeah, you can get off me now, jeez,” Kanae mumbled, not really trying to untangle Kyoko’s arms around her neck. “How many days ago was this, again?”

Kyoko counted them back on her fingers. “Five.”

“Okay, yes, go to the doctor. Go to the doctor as soon as you can. You can’t leave this for that long without some sort of official diagnosis.”

“Okay!” 

Kyoko grinned but there was still something about her that made Kanae think she was lying about something. Maybe it was the subtle slump in her shoulders or the way her smile seemed just a bit too bright but Kanae was sure. There was something else to this story.

Kyoko gave one last smile, checked the time on her watch and stood up to start making her evening meal.

“Are you staying for dinner, Moko-san?” she asked. “I was going to make curry.”

Kanae raised an eyebrow at her. It looked like her friend wasn’t going to tell her the  _ other  _ thing so she stood up, cocked her hip to the side confidently and said, “I’ll stay for food if you tell me the rest of the story. Something else happened that you’re worried about. What is it?”

Kyoko fumbled the large metal pot she was pulling down from an overhead cupboard and it clanged painfully against the kitchen tiles. It was followed by a knife that Kyoko knocked off the bench as she spun around in surprise. The knife caught on a chopping board and pulled it and the collection of vegetables on it down onto the floor as well.

Kyoko stood in the middle of the mess of cooking pots, large knifes and half-squished vegetables looking entirely too innocent.

“What are you talking about, Moko-san? There’s nothing else,” she said.

Kanae wordlessly grabbed her coat off the back of one of the dining chairs and headed towards the exit. Kyoko threw herself onto her back three steps later.

“Wait! No! Moko-san, stay! I’m sorry I lied to you! I’ll tell you everything!”

“Okay, okay! I’ll stay. Jeez!” shouted Kanae over Kyoko’s pleading, wriggling to try and loosen the other girl from her back. “But it better be the whole truth!”

“It will be, I promise!”

Kanae nodded and headed back towards the dining table, Kyoko’s toes still dragging on the floor as she clung to her back.

“Jeez! I said I’d stay! Let me go, already!” she snapped and Kyoko fell away like a leech under salt. 

Kyoko walked around the table and into the kitchen, carefully picking up the vegetables. They were a bit too bruised for curry after their fall but she could still turn them into soup.

“So, what is the other thing?” asked Kanae, leaning against the dining room side of the island bench as Kyoko washed the floor-muck off the vegetables. 

“Well,” began Kyoko very deliberately, obviously searching for the right words. “It’s about that time at the airport.”

“The one that got turned into that pointless article?”

“Yes, that one. You see, I was playing the role of Tsuruga Ren’s Wife and --”

“But you are  _ are  _ Tsuruga Ren’s wife.”

Kyoko paused and chewed her lip for a moment. “I am but I’m not,” she said at last. “Twenty-six year old Hizuri Kyoko is Tsuruga Ren’s Wife, not seventeen year old Mogami Kyoko. Do you get what I mean?”

“I get it. I just think it’s stupid making that distinction at this point,” said Kanae.

“Well, this was in the past so I can’t really change it now,” said Kyoko a little sullenly.

“Go on with the story,” said Kanae and Kyoko did.

“So, I was playing Tsuruga Ren’s Wife and, as his wife, I made him promise to call me every day that he was away. It feels a bit excessive to say that now that I’m out of character but it felt right at the time.”

“And did he promise?”

“Yes, he promised to call ‘at least once a day’,” Kyoko said as she rolled her eyes. “And since people from the cast and crew of his current movie might have overheard that promise, he’s actually been doing it.”

“I don’t exactly see the problem. You just have to put up with one five minute conversation with Kuon-san a day. You were probably doing more than that before he left,” said Kanae.

“No, that’s not the problem. Yesterday, when he called, he said… he said that… that he loved me…” 

Kanae blinked. Kyoko had practically whispered the last two words so she couldn’t be sure what she’d just heard. 

“And I know,” Kyoko went on, talking quickly, “that he didn’t mean it like that. That he just meant it like you would say it to family, in passing. It was just a mistake and he confused me for his mother or something but I still can’t stop thinking about it.”

Kanae stared at her best friend.

“Moko-san?” said Kyoko.

Kanae just kept staring.

“Moko-san, what do you think? I’m being stupid, aren’t I?”

Kanae shook her head, disbelievingly. “You are being stupid.”

“I knew it. I should just force it out of my head and stop--”

“Kyoko,” Kanae interrupted in a slow, calm voice, “you realise you’re married to this guy, right?”

“Yes.”

“So, this is hardly going to be the first time he’s said that. In fact, I can tell you he says it a lot. So often it’s actually annoying.”

“But that’s future Tsuruga-san! Or present Tsuruga-san… or whatever he is. It’s the thirty year old Tsuruga-san that’s married to the twenty-six year old me. Why would Tsuruga-san as he is now tell me he l-loves me unless it was just an honest mistake?”

Kanae rolled her eyes. “Because he does.”

“No he doesn’t! He didn’t five days ago, according to his memory.”

Kanae sighed. “You can only remember until you were seventeen, right?”

Kyoko nodded.

“Is that before or after  _ Dark Moon _ ?”

“After.”

Kanae thought for a moment and then nodded. “Yep. He loved you then. I remember.”

“No he didn’t!”

“He did. I know because you told me. And even if you hadn’t, I’d all but confirmed it myself. I suspected something when you were filming that Fuwa Sho PV and I knew after that Valentine’s Day fiasco on the set of  _ Dark Moon _ .”

Sho’s PV. That was almost the very beginning. He couldn’t have loved her for that long. He didn’t even love her now.

“B-But he told Bo that he loved someone else!” Kyoko insisted.

Kanae raised an eyebrow at her. “Did he? What were his exact words?”

Kyoko scrunched her eyes shut, trying to remember. There was the sixteen year old high school girl but… did she ever have a name?”

“I don’t think he ever said her name,” said Kyoko at last.

“Then, what  _ did  _ he say?”

“That she was in high school, she was sixteen and…” that he didn’t deserve to be happy. “I don’t think I should tell you the last part. It feels like an invasion of privacy.”

“Trust me, I have no desire to hear Kuon-san’s deepest, darkest secrets. But sixteen and in high school. That’s all the details you had and you decided he was in love with someone else?”

Kyoko nodded.

“How old were you when he told Bo this?”

“Sixteen…”

Kanae just looked at her like she was an idiot.

“That doesn’t mean anything, Moko-san! There are heaps of sixteen year olds in Tokyo!”

Kanae blinked but, otherwise, didn’t move.

“Stop that! I know what I heard!”

“I’ll stop when you get it through your thick skull. Jeez! I’m sick of all this unnecessary drama! The only mistake Kuon-san made was that I don’t think he was intending to tell you anything. He told you the truth accidently. The truth, Kyoko. Jeez, come on! This is the guy who’s been in love with you since you were sixteen and didn’t make a move until you were twenty. He’s a hesitant, shy boy -- contrary to his looks. Go put him out of his misery and give him a call. Tell him you understand and you love him too.”

“But I --” 

“Don’t give me that. I’ve been your best friend for ten years. I know everything.”

Kyoko hung her head. “You always give the best advice, Moko-san,” she said miserably and started chopping vegetables.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I quite like this chapter, actually, if only because I love Kanae. She tells it as it is. Trust her to be the only one with any common sense. Honestly, I don't know why they expected any from the president. He'd enjoy this way too much to try and fix it. Hopefully I managed to get the dynamic right between her and Kyoko.  
> I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've ever used the word 'sexy' in a story. I just really don't like the way it sounds, aesthetically, so I generally try to avoid it.  
> 'Like a leech under salt' is a terrible metaphor and I apologise. We tried to use salt to get a leech off my cousin's dog once. The salt kept just piling up and the leech was still there. The dog quite enjoyed it, though. She just looked on disdainfully like, 'what are you silly humans trying to achieve?'
> 
> How did you feel about the chapter? Am I still doing alright? What about the phone call that Kyoko's reluctantly said she'd make?
> 
> I'm still in the office, by the way. It's gotten to the point where my dad's like, 'hey, you... um... you work out anything for your thing-a-ma-jig?' which is about as close to telling me to sort myself out as he ever gets. I'll get around to it, Dad. I'll get around to it as soon as I have the money to get around to it. Which might be never. Until then, I'm just going to keep living in your office. 
> 
> Now, I'm off to have a picnic with my brother-in-law's parents. Apparently my sister has called us in as a rescue crew. I feel like there was something else I wanted to talk to you about but I've totally forgotten. Hopefully it wasn't too important. Until next week,  
> Ocean.


	8. Chapter 8

Kyoko stood in front of the mirror, taking in her reflection. The even shorter than she was used to, wavy, black hair. The additional height. She’d even grown some boobs (just barely) in the nine years she’d forgotten. She stood there, taking slow, measured breaths, and staring at her reflection to remind herself she was twenty-six. She wasn’t a scared little seventeen year old anymore. She had a strict schedule for that day and she was going to make sure she followed it. 

The first thing on her list was peeking into her vision, interrupting her concentration. In her reflection, through the open closet doors, she could see a little blue and white box sitting on her bedside table.

First up: pregnancy test.

Next: final costume fitting for her character in  _ Cross the Floor _ . 

Then: a doctor’s appointment.

Followed by: an interview with a magazine.

Lastly: call Tsuruga-san.

That was probably the scariest thing of all. She had to call Tsuruga-san and ask him what he’d meant by  _ those words _ . Moko-san had said to take them as they appeared but Kyoko couldn’t bring herself to do it. She’d been a complete idiot over love once and she was not falling back into that hole easily ever again. She was going to have to ask him.

She took one last look in the mirror and strode purposefully over to the daunting blue and white box. She only had fifteen minutes before Akechi-san was due to arrive. It was time to pee on a stick. 

Five minutes later, she sat on the couch with her eyes closed. The stick sat on the coffee table in front of her on top of a tissue. She’d initially sat on the edge of the bed to wait but all of its connotations and associations had forced her away. The timer went off about ten seconds ago but she still couldn’t bring herself to open her eyes and see the result of the test. 

No, that was stupid. She’d have to open her eyes at some point. Akechi-san would be at her door in ten minutes or less and she still hadn’t brushed her teeth  _ or _ packed her bag for the day. She’d have to open them. She was going to open them. She was going to do it right… right…  _ now! _

She forced her eyes open all at once and stared at the offending pee stick. She looked at it once, then to the instructions on the box, back to the stick, back to cross reference the result against the box one more time.

Negative.

She breathed a sigh of relief. Now she just had to do this for two more weeks and she’d know for certain that she was safe. It wasn’t a process she was looking forward to.

_ Okay, Kyoko _ , she told herself _ , that’s the first task completed. Now you have to get up. You have to finish getting ready. There are still four more tasks to do today. _

 

***

 

“I shouldn’t be more than twenty minutes,” said Kyoko to Akechi-san as she slipped on a pair of sunglasses and stepped out of the car.

“You made sure to request a private waiting room?” said Nao.

“I did,” confirmed Kyoko.

“It’s just that, with that article a few days ago, there couldn’t really be a worse time for you to go to a doctor. This would be like crack to those in the rumour-mill.”

“I have to go, Akechi-san. This could be serious enough to affect my work even more than it already has.”

“I know but I can be worried about your physical well-being and your reputation at the same time, can’t I? It’s my job, after all.”

Kyoko smiled. It was exactly what she’d come to expect from her manager.

“I’ll see you in twenty minutes, Akechi-san,” she said.

Nao nodded and drove away as Kyoko pushed open a very plain door with ‘Private Clinic’ printed on it in crisp, white letters.

She walked to the reception desk with her head bent. She needed to check in and get to a private waiting room as soon as possible but the receptionist was on the phone. Kyoko tried to arrange her hair as a shield between her and the other patients but it was too short to do a very good job.

Finally, the man behind the desk put down his phone and looked up.

“Good afternoon,” greeted Kyoko politely but quietly. “I’m Hizuri Kyoko. I have an appointment with Yamada-sensei for two o’clock?”

The man glanced at his computer screen briefly before he said, “Ah, yes. With the private waiting room?”

Kyoko nodded.

“Okay. That’s all fine. Just through that door, Hizuri-san.” He gestured towards an unmarked white door just to the left of his desk.

Kyoko thanked him and slipped inside, feeling like she was wearing someone else’s skin. She wasn’t a Hizuri. 

As soon as the door shut behind her she let out a massive sigh. She wasn’t used to this. She was used to nobody recognising her out of character. All this secrecy was exhausting. Her respect for Tsuruga-san rose even more for his ability to live like a ghost for so long. Being the most boring talent LME had ever employed must take a lot of work. Still, Kyoko had already had a taste of what could happen if she didn’t use discretion. And that had been a fluffy article of no substance. She didn’t want to see what they would conjure up if they saw her in such a controversial place as a  _ doctor’s waiting room _ . 

The costume fitting had gone as expected. There weren’t often too many complications with final fittings. She just had to go in, put on the clothes, and make sure they had been adjusted correctly from the last fitting. It was even a little bit fun, trying on outfit after outfit that Kihara Kanon would wear and chatting with the wardrobe staff of the drama. It really put the finishing touches on the character she’d been building.

She waited only about five minutes for Yamada-sensei. It was just enough time to check her emails and reply to a message from Moko-san. The message had just said ‘did you make an appointment?’ while somehow managing to sound threatening through text alone. 

The short wait for the doctor was nice, considering the usual treatment. She supposed fame had to have its bonuses as well as its drawbacks. Yamada-sensei came into the room with a wide smile on her face and led Kyoko away into another room where, Kyoko assumed, all the actual doctoring happened. 

She was a short woman with the extra kilos on her frame that usually started to set in around middle-age but she moved with such grace and confidence that it was hard not to think she was still beautiful despite that. Or maybe even because of that. 

Her eyes were large and round with carefully drawn eyebrows over them, her nose perfectly balanced the difference between her large eyes and her thin, deep red lips. Kyoko immediately thought that she looked _ clever _ and was reassured by that baseless conviction.

“So,” said Yamada-sensei as she sat down in her chair and crossed her legs elegantly, “what can I do for you today?”

Kyoko explained. The longer she went on, the deeper Yamada-sensei’s frown became.  

“I see,” was all she said when Kyoko had finally finished. 

Kyoko sat in awkward silence for a few moments while the doctor scribbled a few notes onto a pad of paper, swivelled in her chair and typed something into a computer.

“Right,” said Yamada-sensei, finally. “I’m afraid there’s not actually a lot I can do for you. I don’t have X-ray vision and this is certainly not my area of expertise. I’ll have to refer you to a larger hospital for scans. The problem with that is the privacy.”

“You know that’s an issue?”

Yamada-sensei smiled with her thin lips. “Honey,” she said, “you requested a private waiting room. I should think it was pretty obvious. Besides,” she turned back to her computer and clicked a few things, “I know you. You were amazing in  _ My House is Yours _ . Not that you’d remember. And I’ve had my fair share of celebrities walk through my door.”

“Thank you,” said Kyoko and bowed in her chair.

Yamada-sensei looked at her quizzically over her shoulder as she sent the referral away to the hospital and pushed a cardboard card into some sort of machine for encoding. She’d never met such a modest celebrity. Then again, if what the girl had told her was true, this was the Kyoko-san from before she could even really be called a celebrity. Maybe it was to be expected. 

The machine beeped and Yamada-sensei pulled the card out. It was now printed with some sort of complicated barcode. She handed it to Kyoko.

“I’ve made an appointment for you next Sunday at this location.” She pointed at an address on the card. “Is Sunday okay for you?”

Kyoko quickly flipped through her phone. “I have a photoshoot in the morning but otherwise it’s okay.”

“Good,” said Yamada-sensei. “Your appointment is for five in the evening when there shouldn’t be too many other patients there. Well, other than the ones in over night and the emergency cases and… let’s just say the  _ minimum  _ number of other patients there. Now, when you get there, just hand this card to reception. It has all your referral details in it. You won’t even have to say a word. Then the hospital staff will show you the way. Okay?”

Kyoko licked her lips nervously as she stared at the little cardboard card. It just looked like a business card other than the strange barcode. 

“Yes,” she said. “Thank you again, Sensei.” Then she stood up, bowed one more time and went to go pay for the consultation.

 

***

 

The street was filled with signs of a large number of people having recently passed through. Cars were overturned and windows of shops were smashed in. Broken glass covered almost every surface and glittered in the setting sun, lending a sort of beauty to the scene that it didn't seem to deserve. Rubbish littered the ground and blew across the city like plastic tumbleweeds. And yet, despite all these signs of human occupation, the street was entirely empty and barren except for one, small Japanese camera crew. 

Ushio stood in the middle of the street, microphone in hand.

“The new military government, led by General Jenico,” he said, “currently rules unquestioned by officials. However, citizens have been left angry at the sudden and violent change of leadership that he has employed. Supporters of President Murroina and the previous regime have taken to the streets in riots and protests every night since the coup to show their malcontent and the military government has responded with force. As of yet, there are no official figures, but the death toll is estimated to be in the hundreds.

“Last night’s chaos seems like a distant memory by the light of day but it’s clear that  _ this _ ,” Ushio gestures at the destruction behind him, “will not be the end of the violence. Fushimi Ushio, Channel 3 News, Belleo.”

The news crew’s director called cut and Ushio let his mic hang limp in his hand. 

“I don’t know,” he said to no one in particular. “This still doesn’t feel like we’re capturing the full atmosphere of this place.”

The cameraman looked up at him wordlessly.

“Where is the fear?” Ushio went on, regardless of whether the others were listening or not. “Where is the anger? This all feels too cold. Too distant.” 

He tapped his finger absently against the solid shape of his phone in his pocket three times. He still hadn’t called Mao-san since they’d argued over his decision to take the story but that didn’t matter right then. 

“We’re still missing something,” he said.

 

“ _ Cut! _ ” said the director of  _ Convictions _ . He frowned and scratched his stubbly chin with a single finger before shrugging. “There’s still something off but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Everyone take five and, if I still haven’t figured it out by then, we’ll use this take.”

Ren sighed and stretched his neck. There was something about the way that Ushio stood that kept giving him muscle cramps. 

Murasame stepped onto the set and walked up to Ren.

“You alright, Tsuruga?” he asked.

“I’m fine, just stiff,” Ren replied tersely. Ushio’s phone felt too heavy in his pocket. It was a constant reminder of his real life. 

Ren looked up to see Yashiro at a table covered in finger food and sighed again. He really didn’t feel like eating right then. Still, Murasame was herding him in Yashiro’s direction and then his manager was placing a plate of sandwiches and dried fruit down in front of him.

Ren pulled Ushio’s phone out of his pocket and placed it side-by-side with his own on the table in front of him, staring at them both. If there was one thing he and his character had in common it’s that they were both rubbish at calling their wives when they should. 

Ren hadn’t called Kyoko yesterday. He hadn’t been brave enough after his slip up the day before. She hadn’t called him, either. But he knew that he had to call her today otherwise she’d worry herself into thinking there’d been some accident. She wasn’t the sort of person to assume everything was okay when an expected call didn’t arrive. 

Murasame glanced from Ren to his silent phone and back again with a smirk. “Expecting a call?” he said.

Ren shook his head. “No.” She was more likely to call Yashiro than him if she thought something had happened. 

“Trouble in paradise?”

Ren glared at him but the look quickly softened. This was his ‘friend’ after all. He couldn’t keep glaring at him like that. 

“I think I said something wrong,” he sighed.

Yashiro slid into the seat beside him. Ren glanced at him. If it were just him there, he could tell the truth. Yashiro already knew the whole story, after all. But he couldn’t tell Murasame he’d screwed up by showing affection. That just wouldn’t make sense. So he stretched the truth a little.

“I told her she was my inspiration and she got angry at me,” he said, remembering the conversation from a couple of days before. 

“What? Like your muse?” said Murasame, the smirk back on his face.

“No, I mean she’s inspirational. Like a goal to work towards.”

Murasame frowned and Yashiro looked mildly surprised. He didn’t remember twenty-one year old Ren being so honest.

“Why would that make her angry?” said Murasame. “Isn’t that a compliment?”

Ren shrugged. “That’s what I thought. But she said not to tease her.”

“Did you tell her you weren’t?”

“Of course I did.”

“And?”

“She still thought I was making fun of her.”

Murasame shook his head. “I don’t know what to tell you, Tsuruga. Sometimes women just don’t make sense.”

Ren gave a half smile. That was true but it didn’t apply in this case. He knew exactly why Kyoko hadn’t believed him. It was that bastard’s fault. He’d trod her into the mud until she was unable to think of herself in any positive way at all. 

He didn’t share these intimate details about Kyoko with Murasame. Nor did he share his sudden urge to track down Fuwa and throttle him. Instead, he picked up a sandwich and forced himself to eat. Kyoko would want him to have a proper meal so that’s what he did. Even if the bread felt like sawdust in his mouth.

And then his phone rang.

Ren had it up to his ear before the first ring could even finish.

“Kyoko?” he said, the word muffled through the half chewed mouthful he hadn’t bothered to swallow. 

Murasame laughed in the background but Ren ignored him. He was listening for her voice.

“Good afternoon, Tsuruga-san,” she said formally. He could almost hear her 90° bow. 

Ren’s heart split in two. One half was just glad to hear her voice, the other half was crying at her obvious discomfort.

“Are you busy at the moment? Can you talk?” she said.

Ren finally swallowed his mouthful of sandwich. “I can talk,” he said quickly, a little too desperate and Murasame burst out into laughter again.

Ren fixed him with a glare, stood up and walked away from the rest of the cast. 

“We’ve just finished a scene at the moment,” he said a little more calmly, “And I’m not in the next one so I should have at least an hour.” Provided the director couldn’t work out what was wrong with the last take.

The next scene was Murasame and Nakahara-san’s last scene of the Borneo shoot. It was the penultimate scene of the whole movie where Mao and Ushio’s best friend arrive in the fictional country to visit Ushio’s unmarked grave. There was no dialogue but the emotions involved were complicated so, with any luck, it would take at least a few tries. 

“Oh,” said Kyoko. “Good.” She didn’t sound pleased, though.

Then there was just silence. Ren could hear her breathing but nothing else. No, wait, what was that noise? Was she chewing her lip?

“Kyoko-chan --” he started gently.

“Tsuruga-san!” she interrupted, suddenly in a hurry. “I need to -- I mean, we need to -- We have to…”

“Kyoko-chan,” he tried again. “Calm down. I know what you’re trying to say. This is about what I said the day before yesterday, isn’t it?”

“I want to know,” Kyoko said determinedly but a little too quickly for Ren to believe she was genuinely confident, “what you meant by it.”

Ren blinked. ‘What he meant’? He’d expected her to be angry at him. Maybe to dismiss the entire idea. He hadn’t expected her to not even understand the words.

“Uh…” he muttered. 

Here’s where he decided which path he was going to take. Truth or lies. What was he going to use to unfairly tie her to him? He needed to do it somehow because he was pretty sure he couldn’t live without her anymore. 

“Tsuruga-san,” said Kyoko and Ren snapped out of his reverie. “I talked to Mo-- Kotonami-san. She said that you probably hadn’t meant to say it. Is that true?”

There it was! The perfect out! He could lie and get away with it. Yes, he hadn’t meant to say it. It was a simple slip of the tongue. It hadn’t meant anything. Maybe he could even throw in something about how if she was flustered by such a thing, she’d never be a true professional. 

But that was cruel. Cruel and childish. She was genuinely worried about this. He knew that word was a trauma of hers. 

He looked over at the rest of the  _ Convictions  _ staff, having a late afternoon tea in the dying sun, and wondered vaguely how Ushio would do this. 

Ushio was smart but his intensely logical side often lead to him making unintentionally cruel choices. Choices that he then agonised over because he couldn't help empathising with those he’d hurt. After all, at heart, he truly was a kind man. But, no matter how the aftermath hurt him, he never regretted those choices. They ate at him from the inside but, deep in the night when Ushio was tormented by nightmares, he would be comforted by believing he’d done the right thing.

So what was ‘the right thing’? Which choice would Ren end up not regretting? Did he lie to maintain the status quo for the sake of her comfort? Or did he tell the truth?

Wait. No, that first option was selfish as well as cruel and childish. He wasn’t lying for the sake of her comfort. He was lying so she would stay by his side. 

Ren gritted his teeth. He knew which choice Ushio would make. Now he just needed the guts to make it himself.

“It’s true,” he said after a very long pause. “I didn’t mean to say it. I was distracted. Someone was calling me back to set.” He clenched his eyes shut in fear and forced himself onward. “And I had been thinking it so much that the words just slipped out.”

He waited, his eyes still clenched shut. The silence stretched out.

_ If this all goes wrong, I’m blaming you, Ushio! _

It was nice to have someone to foist the blame onto. It made Ren feel a little better even though Kyoko still hadn’t said anything. Until he realised that, even with someone to blame for it, Kyoko was still going to hate  _ him _ .

“Please,” said Kyoko and Ren felt the air flood back into his lungs. 

Please, what? ‘Please stay away from me’? ‘Please, I want a divorce’? 

Ren waited again. The waiting was horrible.

“Please, rephrase that,” said Kyoko. “I’m not sure I entirely understood.”

Ren wasn’t sure if his heart could take much more of this. She wanted him to say it again? What sort of torture was this?

Still, he shut his eyes again and jumped. He’d already done it once, what was one more time?

“I’m saying,” he said, swallowing down the lump in his throat, “that I was telling the truth that time. I love you, Kyoko-chan. I probably always have…”

Silence. 

_ Please don’t make me say it again. _

Then: “Really?” 

It was whispered so quietly, Ren was almost sure it had just been the wind.

“Really.” His chest still felt tight but he could breathe again.

“Really?” she asked again and Ren caught himself smiling.

“Really, Kyoko-chan. Please, give me some sort of answer here. I’m sweating like crazy with nerves.”

“ _ I _ make  _ you  _ nervous?” He could hear the disbelief in her voice. The mere concept of Tsuruga Ren being nervous was impossible to her.

“More than you will ever know,” he said.

“I… just…” she tried before her brain hit a bump and she said, “Really?” again.

“Yes, really. I thought we’d gotten passed that point. I love you. God, do I love you. It’s almost crazy how much I love you.”

Silence again and Ren was sure he’d overdone it. 

“Me, too,” she said at last. “I-I don’t think I’ll be able to… to actually say the words but… me, too, Tsuruga-san.”

“Really?” Ren breathed and Kyoko laughed.

“Now  _ you’re _ doing it!” 

Ren suddenly understood all her long silences. It was impossible to think of anything to say. There was just… happiness, relief, a hint of disbelief, an overwhelming sense of euphoria.

“Thank you,” was all he could think to say. “Thank you, Kyoko-chan.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Da-dadaa! It happened!   
> What did you think? It probably could have gone a bit later but this is where it fell when I was smashing out these first ~14 chapters on pure inspiration alone so... maybe it flows better like this. This fic is rapidly approaching the longest thing I've ever written. The only thing longer at this point is an original novel I wrote years and years ago.   
> Though, I feel a bit like this chapter is a trivialisation of the word 'love'. Seeing as... well, this is the first time either of them have come clean about their feelings. Isn't 'love' a bit heavy at this point? But 'I like you' really isn't Ren's style so I'm stuck.   
> But, so ends the first arc -- sort of. There are a couple of bridging chapters between the end of this one and the beginning of the next one so this arc kind of goes on for a little bit longer.   
> Just curious after this chapter: Do private waiting rooms actually exist or did I make them up?  
> Something I definitely did make up: 'Jenico, 'Murroina' and 'Belleo' are all nonsense words that come straight from my imagination. Any resemblance to any actual language or places is entire incidental. 
> 
> Also! I remembered what I was going to tell you last chapter. I've had some thoughts about a title for this story. What do you think about 'Someone Else's Reality'? I was trying to come up with a title for a drama that turns up later in the fic and this popped into my head. Chances are we won't even make it to that drama before the story ends so I just sort of went, 'Why not use it elsewhere?'  
> Let me know what you think. It feels wrong to rename it without consulting you after these two months you've put up with having it untitled. 
> 
> Thanks as always for reading! I'll see you all next week!  
> Ocean.


	9. Chapter 9

They were re-filming that scene, after all. The director was half-way through the next scene when he snapped his fingers and shouted “I’ve got it!” much to the annoyance of Nakahara-san who was having a good take.

Apparently Ushio’s news story had to be filmed in the morning, it didn’t make sense for him to be filming it in the evening. So, there they all were, with the exception of Murasame and Nakahara Chiyo who had both taken late-night flights back to Japan after their filming wrapped, pouring back into the slums again as the sun came up. Here the locals didn’t mind letting the crew tip broken glass everywhere as long as they cleaned up after themselves and paid for the use of the street.

Ren watched the backstage crew push a burnt out husk of a car into place and tip it on its side with the same dopey smile on his face that a tired, middle-aged woman might have while watching kitten videos. 

“What’s got you so happy?” asked Yashiro, offering his talent a bottle of water and sipping from one himself.

Ren took the bottle and tried to school his expression. The smile just leaked back to the surface. He didn’t bother trying again. Why would he when he was so genuinely happy?

Yashiro gave a knowing smile. “I take it you and Kyoko-chan made up, then?”

“We did,” said Ren.

“And the smile is because of some minor step forward in your relationship? I remember this stage of it. You were hopeless. Let me guess: you’re no longer sempai/kohai, you’re friends now.” Yashiro took another gulp of water.

Ren kept smiling. “She said she loved me.”

Yashiro spat his water out all over the street. “She what? Seriously? In those words?”

Ren shrugged. “Well,” he said, “not in those exact words.”

Yashiro slumped forward in disappointment. “So this is all your delusion, then…”

“No, she…” Ren stopped himself, realising that he had been about to say ‘she meant to say she loved me,’ which was perhaps the saddest thing for someone in his position to insist. “I told her how I feel and she said ‘me, too’,” he eventually settled on. “There. You wanted exact wording and that’s how it happened.”

Yashiro was torn between being ecstatically happy for Ren and being skeptical of good news. He already been through all this once before, after all. 

“Ren, I’m glad you’re so happy, I really am, but… this is Kyoko-chan. You haven’t thought that, maybe, she meant it some other way?”

Ren froze, considering it for a moment before he shook his head. “No,” he said. “She meant it that way. I’ve finally fallen prey to my own hope, Yashiro, and I won’t accept that she meant it any other way. I’m determined to be happy.”

Yashiro smiled. “Well, if you’re so sure, then it must be so.” He turned back to the set where the crew were putting the final touches on the street. “Now you’re a proper married couple again, then. Those were a weird few days.”

Ren turned on his manager with a frown. “I wouldn’t say that, Yashiro. The memories are still gone. We’re going to have a few more ‘weird days’ yet. And, as for Kyoko, our feelings only became mutual yesterday so she is my wife by law and my girlfriend by heart. Maybe. We might not even be that.”

“Determined to be happy,” Yashiro reminded him and Ren made an effort to return to that blissful, floating happiness he’d been in before. 

“Okay!” shouted the set manager so the whole cast could hear. “We’re all good to go!”

Ren shot Yashiro one last dopey smile as if to say, ‘see? I’m still happy,’ before he stepped out onto the street. The assistant director went to go find the rest of Ushio’s fictional film crew so that the scene could begin again.

 

***

 

Meanwhile, Kyoko was spending most of her first day filming  _ Cross the Floor _ actually walking across floors. 

She walked from a parked cab up the steps of the National Diet Building. The first take of that shot was surprisingly difficult. It was hard to look graceful while climbing out of a taxi. Most of the inside of the building would be filmed on a set in the studio, it was too difficult and too expensive to film inside the National Diet Building as often as they’d need to. But the twenty seconds or so it took her to climb the steps and cross the foyer were filmed in the real thing. 

So Kyoko got out of the cab gracefully and sauntered up the steps with the unhurried speediness of someone who just naturally moved quickly and walked through the entry foyer into another room. Then she did it again and it was filmed from a different angle. Then she changed costumes and did it again, they way Kihara Kanon would do it in episode two.  _ Then again _ . New angle.  _ Again _ . Different clothes.  _ Again.  _ Walking out of the building instead of in.  _ Again _ . Episode three entrance.  _ Again _ .  _ And again _ . Until Kyoko was almost sick of walking. 

She walked up the stairs. She walked down the stairs. She paused on the stairs to look pensive or whimsical or determined. She walked into the building and out of the building. In one of the scenes for episode one she had to drop a stack of documents on the floor because she was too busy admiring the grandness of everything to watch where she was going and had to hastily dodge a pillar. She walked across the room left to right, right to left, top to bottom and bottom to top. She even had to walk across the room diagonally a few times. Sometimes she stopped for one reason or another but, for the most part, she went storming across the polished tiles like the determined young woman that Kihara Kanon was.

There was a strange subtlety to it. She had to take into account Kanon-chi’s mood and emotional state, where her character was at that point in the series and how that would affect the way she moved, what feelings she would have walking into that particular building. Sometimes she walked with another actor. Sometimes there was even dialogue. Most of it was Kanon-chi arguing with the other character. Those were the fun scenes because there was someone else to play off.

Then it was done. She’d only had four NGs all day but they’d still been filming for twelve hours, only stopping for lunch, and Kyoko was exhausted. Still, they’d managed to get all the ‘walking across the entry foyer’ shots from the first five episodes. 

All she wanted to do at that point was go home and sleep. Although, if Tsuruga-san called she wouldn’t be adverse to that either. But neither of those things happened. Instead, she was cornered by Hara Katsuro who played her corrupt direct-superior in the drama. 

He was a sweaty man, that was the first thing Kyoko noticed about him. He was sweaty and round with thinning hair that had been oiled to his skull for the sake of his sleazy role. 

She wasn’t particularly fond of Hara-san. He had a habit of looking down on the other actors. Which made sense when it was her -- without her memories she was the same as a newbie -- but it made her angry when she saw him doing it to the other cast members.

“Kyoko-chan!” he called out to her as she was saying goodbye to the director. “Good work today.”

Kyoko bowed respectfully. He might not be up to the Tsuruga-san level of ‘perfect sempai’ but he was still her elder. “You too, Hara-san,” she said.

“You know,” he said, “I was surprised you managed to get so many different feelings into just walking around. I mean, it made sense when it was a scene with dialogue, it’s easy to put emotions into words, but even when you weren’t speaking, I could still feel whether you were angry or apprehensive or down right afraid. That must have been a hard feat to accomplish for such a young actress. Did you pick up some tips from Ren-kun, perhaps?” 

He laughed and Kyoko felt her eye twitch. The nerve of this man. Calling him ‘Ren-kun’ like they were friends when he’d never even acted with him before. Kyoko wouldn’t be surprised if he’d never even met Tsuruga-san and he was still calling him ‘Ren-kun’. She could forgive everything else about Hara-san until then. That tipped the scales.

_ Show some respect!  _ Her heart shouted at the fat, balding man in front of her.  _ He’s a better actor than you’ll ever be! _

Needless to say, she didn’t let her heart’s voice out of her mouth. 

Instead, she smiled her perfect hostess smile and said, “No, Ren-san hasn’t helped me with this role. He’s been far too busy lately with his own work. Although, do you remember a teenage drama called  _ Box-R _ , Hara-san? It aired about nine years ago.”

“No,” said Hara. “No, I can’t say I do. But then, I’ve never had much time for teenage dramas. Always a bit too flimsy for me.”

Kyoko wondered whether he’d think the scene of Yumika pouring nail polish remover over a girl’s face and then threatening to light it on fire was flimsy.

“Ah, well, I was just going to say that Ren-san taught me how to walk like a model for my role in that project and I’m using a more relaxed and natural version of it for Kanon.” She carefully avoided using the nickname she'd developed for her character. “So, in a way, he has helped me with her,” she said and then she bowed. “I’m sorry but, if you’ll excuse me, Hara-san, I have another job to get to.” 

Then she hurried over to where Akechi-san was waiting in the corner before he could reply.

“I wasn’t aware we had another job today,” said Nao. 

Kyoko looked up at her with a guilty grimace.  

“Come on,” Nao laughed forgivingly, “let’s get you home.” 

 

***

 

The days passed quickly, after that. Ren moved onto the emotionally trying days of filming the scenes where Ushio was tortured. He filled them with a lot of screaming and clenching teeth and muttering Mao’s name between fevered nightmares. Kyoko’s character’s party won an election and she was shown around her new job, meeting the characters that she would betray and who would betray her as the series went on. Ren kept calling every night, though he left it until they were out of the rainforest and back in their hotel ever since a second tree-climbing attempt ended badly. She told him about Hara Katsuro and Ren laughed at her impersonation of him. Kyoko went for ice cream with Kanae to update her on what had happened since the last time they’d met. She took her second pregnancy test and it came back negative again. The fear in her heart was beginning to calm and her thoughts turned more towards making sure the bin was empty when Tsuruga-san came back so he would never know she had been afraid to begin with.

And then Sunday arrived. 

Not only was the it the day before Tsuruga-san got back from Borneo but it was also the day Kyoko went to go look at the inside of her skull. 

She returned home after her morning photoshoot, donned a long, brown wig as well as her usual sunglasses to be extra safe, checked the barcoded card was in her purse, and then waited for Akechi-san to arrive to give her a ride. 

Nao had insisted she take Kyoko to and from the hospital. She couldn’t go in, a grown woman with an attendant might attract unwanted attention, but she could still be outside in the car for moral support. 

They drove across town in silence, to a big hospital on the outskirts of Tokyo. When Kyoko had gone to get out of the car, Nao caught her arm for a moment.

“I’m sure everything’s fine, Kyoko-chan. Don’t worry. The scans will come back normal,” she said.

“Thank you, Akechi-san,” murmured Kyoko in reply, then she shut the door and headed inside. 

 

The reception area was crowded and Kyoko was glad she’d decided to wear the wig. She’d barely even recognised herself in the mirror on her way out the door. Hopefully it would be enough that none of these strangers would, either. She waited in line for the desk and, when she finally got to the front, she passed over her little barcoded card with a smile. 

The receptionist pushed the card into a machine similar to the one Yamada-sensei had used to encode it in the first place and did a double-take when the information appeared on her screen. Her eyes flicked from the screen to Kyoko’s face and back again as a thousand things flooded through her brain.

_ Kyoko-san? _

_ I’m a huge fan. _

_ I can’t believe I’m actually seeing the real life you, face to face. _

_ I’ve been following your career ever since  _ Dark Moon.

_ What’s it like being married to Tsuruga Ren? _

_ Why are you getting brain scans? _

But she didn’t say any of that. She employed her own amateur acting skills, gave her idol a professional smile and handed her back her card.

“Thank you, Hizuri-san. Take a seat and someone will be here shortly to escort you. Don’t lose your referral card. You’ll need it again when you get to radiology.”

Kyoko thanked the young woman and took a seat on one of the sterile chairs, strategically positioned so as not to disrupt pedestrian traffic in the waiting room. She took out her phone and tried to look unthreatening. What she really wanted to do, though, was review the notes she’d taken about her most recently completed project. She had to attend its premiere the next week and she still wasn’t entirely sure she’d memorised everything. But she couldn’t. Not while she was in such a public place. 

It was fifteen minutes before anyone came to collect her. An orderly arrived to lead her through the hospital. They passed a doorway that lead to A & E, where the sounds of urgent, authoritative voices, hurrying feet, rolling gurneys, children crying, and controlled chaos flooded through into the rest of the hospital. They passed a turn off to terminal care that was calm and quiet and more than a little depressing. Then they passed the neonatal unit and the ICU and Kyoko’s feet stopped. 

There was a sound. A gentle, whooshing, whirring sound that rose in pitch and then fell in pitch in a steady rhythm. The sound was interspersed by an equally steady beeping. Though they were both steady, the whooshing and the beeping didn’t quite go at the same rate and so were constantly slipping in and out of sync with each other. It was strangely annoying and Kyoko couldn’t help wanting to fix the sounds so that they aligned.

“Excuse me,” she asked the orderly who hadn’t noticed that she had stopped yet, “what’s that sound?”

The orderly put his head to one side as if listening carefully but, after a minute, eventually shook his head.

“What sound?” he said.

Kyoko frowned and stared at a spot on the floor as she listened again. “There's definitely something there,” she insisted. 

The orderly just shook his head. “Look, Ma’am, it’s my job to show you the way, that’s all. I have more important stuff to be doing than escorting people here and there. So let’s just go.”

Kyoko listened to the sound for a second more before she shook her head and pushed it to the back of her mind. If she pretended it wasn’t there for long enough, maybe it would go away.

“Right, of course. Sorry for the delay,” she said and the orderly hurried on. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so begins the transition to the next arc.
> 
> I feel like I should take this opportunity to explain the meaning behind 'Cross the Floor' as the title of a political drama. My apologies in advance for any factual errors, most of this I learnt about seven years ago in a school trip to parliament house.   
> In Australia, the voting on bills in the senate and house of representatives is taken by seeing how many people are standing to each side of the room. Say, one side was yea and one side was nay -- or something. For the most part, people tend to stick with whatever their party has decided since they get in trouble if they don't (unless t's a deliberate conscious vote) but, occasionally, when there's a matter that they feel is too important to be sidelined by party stance, they will literally 'cross the floor' to stand with the opposite party/parties/independents. I wonder if this term can be applied to every country that uses the Westminster System...   
> It basically means: 'going against your party's wishes for the sake of something you personally believe in'.  
> Obviously, Japan doesn't use this system and, therefore, this term wouldn't apply to them. But they wouldn't be using English, either. Just think of it as me translating whatever their equivalent term would be into an appropriate English term. That's assuming they have an equivalent term... 
> 
> Okay, that's enough about that. There's a reason I'm not studying politics. How did you like the chapter? We're finally moving into some of the more medical aspects of the story (which, I promise, will be better researched than that messy explanation up there ^^). Again there's a little bit of future tech with that referral card. I'm not sure if this system would actually be any more efficient but whatever. 
> 
> I wasn't sure if I'd even get to post a chapter today. My mum's been pretty much living in the office for the last few days. Ah, the troubles that come when you're laptop is broken and your mother works from home... But, obviously I snuck in. I really need to take my laptop to a shop. If only I had infinite money... 
> 
> I think we will go with 'Someone Else's Reality'. Sorry if the sudden name change causes any confusion. Thank you to those who shared their thoughts with me. I don't say it often enough but your comments really are the best. I would be completely blind without them. Thank you.
> 
> Until next week,  
> Ocean.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Giving you the chapter a day early because I'm literally minutes away from leaving to the coast for the week. Next week's chap should be back on schedule.

Ushio sat, withered in his chair. His cheeks were hollow with starvation. His eyes were sunken and dark from bruises and sleep deprivation. His nose was crooked and broken. His hair was matted against his skull and crusted with his own blood. He was swaying and sweating and he couldn’t stop shivering no matter how hard he tried. 

_ Mao-san _ , he thought,  _ I’m sorry. I’m giving in. I just need one hour’s rest from this. _

He gazed at the blinking red light on the camera. He blinked along with it as he tried to sort his thoughts into something coherent amid all the swirling and hallucinations. 

“Mao-san,” he said eventually, the words tearing up through his throat like sandpaper. He hadn’t had anything to drink for almost three full days. “ _ This is what they want _ :” he said in English with a sigh. “ _ Ultimately, they want government gone from their country. They want foreign support withdrawn from Jenico’s military rule. They want US access rights to the Farrawe River mine to be dissolved and they want you,  _ Mao-san _ , to use the power of the press to pressure the Japanese Government into condemning the new regime. That’s what they want. They don’t want money. If Japan withdraws its support for Jenico, I come home. If they don’t, they’ll kill me. Those are the only two possible outcomes. _ ”

The light blinked itself out and Ushio slumped in the chair. His vision was swimming so heavily from dehydration that he could barely see. The terrorists yanked him upright by his armpit and shoved his face in the direction of the camera once more.

“ **Again** ,” said the leader of the terrorists, his grip still tight on Ushio’s face. “ **Say it again. More sad. More scared. Say it again.** ”

Ushio swallowed dryly and the little light blinked back to life again.

 

“ _ Cut! _ Again!” said the director, creepily echoing the anarchist leader. “It's still too shallow. You already know this, Tsuruga-kun. You know the feelings, we just need them in the scene. This is a man who has given up on his cause, his life, everything. All he has left is bitterness and the knowledge that his wife and child are still safe and sound back in Japan.”

Ren wiped all the exhaustion and terror off his face, glad to be free of it even for a moment, and nodded. 

This scene was killing him. It was hard enough to act being in delirious pain but there were Ushio’s actual feelings on top of that as well. 

He was Ushio so he was still thinking about the power vacuum his captors wanted to create in their fictional country and what the inevitable result of that would mean for the rest of the world. But he couldn’t think properly. He was dehydrated and hallucinating. He was defeated. He was tired.  And, most of all, he absolutely hated himself for going against his own moral compass for the sake of physical comfort. 

Ren could do each feeling separately but it felt impossible to try and show them all at once.

Still, this was his last scene. They’d left it until the end so that Ren would have to film all the torture scenes first. It was supposed to give him a better sense of what Ushio had been through and what sort of headspace he’d be in when he finally gave up. And it did. Ren was sure it did. But this scene was still difficult.

Still, he just had to get through this one last scene. Only one more. Then he could go home to where Kyoko was waiting for him. To where a Kyoko who loved him was. 

 

***

 

Kyoko had just been moved from one waiting room to another. The orderly had lead her from the general waiting room near the entrance, through the hospital and to the radiology waiting room on the complete opposite side of the building. At least there weren’t as many people there. 

It looked like Yamada-sensei was right and there were the minimal number of other patients there for brain scans at five in the evening on a Sunday. There was only one other person with her in the radiology waiting room. A teenage boy who kept frowning at a magazine on the table, relaxing his face and then frowning again. Kyoko wanted to ask him if he was alright but soon dismissed the idea. 

She was supposed to be keeping a low profile, after all. 

A nurse had come in ten minutes earlier to tell them there would be a delay due to an urgent case from A & E. Someone was undergoing full body scans as prep for emergency surgery and both the hospital’s consulting radiologists were held up. 

Kyoko nodded. She understood there had to be priorities in a hospital. The teenage boy frowned and relaxed his face again without saying a word. 

Finally, the nurse appeared again and called for Kyoko. She was led away into a small consultation room where she was asked to present her referral card again. The radiologist scanned it and then handed it back. Kyoko wondered if that meant she still needed to hold onto it. 

The barcode worked like a password with tiered levels of access. The woman at the desk had only been able to access the patient’s name, the time of their appointment, which doctor they had been referred to and which department that doctor operated in. The radiologist, whose name was apparently Aoki Eito according to the plaque on his desk, could see much more than that. After all, he had been forwarded the referral with all the details of the current problem ahead of time for review.

The card granted Aoki access to the patient’s name (before then he’d only seen their insurance number) and their full medical history, not just the current problem. 

“Ah,” he said in his slightly nasal voice. “I see. I see. It’s this case. Well, this is quite the conundrum, isn’t it Hizuri-san?”

“Yes,” said Kyoko.

“I mean, sudden onset retrograde amnesia without trauma? I’ve never heard of such a thing. You aren’t pulling my leg, are you? I know you're a crackshot in the acting world.” He said that with a straight face and Kyoko didn’t know what to reply. She wasn't even sure she knew what he meant by ‘crackshot’. Was that a compliment?

“No, Aoki-sensei. I really have forgotten everything,” she eventually said.

Aoki waved his hand through the air in dismissal. “I’m only teasing! But! We’ll have to get you in the CT scanner all the same. Have a look inside that skull of yours.”

Kyoko was given a hospital gown and ushered into a small curtained-off area to change. 

“Make sure you take off all jewellry, including piercings,” came Aoki-sensei’s voice through the curtain. “Anything and everything metal has to go. You don’t have any implants or anything, do you? Pacemaker? Medication pump? Joint replacement? Metal pins or screws from surgery? Anything like that?”

Kyoko paused in removing her belt and frowned. “Not that I know of.” It was the best she could offer.

“Well, you keep going, then,” said Aoki-sensei. “I’ll just have a quick peruse of your history from the last nine years to be sure.”

She heard him walk away from the curtain. It was reassuring, really, as her jeans pooled on the floor around her feet.

“Oh!” Aoki-sensei shouted from the consultation room as if he’d just remembered something. “You’re not pregnant, are you?”

Kyoko froze. That was a good question. Was she pregnant? She’d cleared two tests already. In another week, she’d take the last one and be certain. It was just one more test.

“No,” she said definitively. “No, I’m not.”

“Good, good,” said Aoki-sensei breezily. “You’re all good on the metal-front as well. There are a couple of surgical pins in your T11, L1 vertebrae but we’re not going anywhere near there. Looks like they’re titanium, too, which is only mildly magnetic anyway so you could even go for an MRI and still be fine. Other than that, you’re all clear.”

That had Kyoko’s attention. She had titanium surgical pins in her spine? Why? What on earth had she done in the last nine years that made that necessary? She ran her fingers up her spine to see if she could feel them but there were a lot of vertebrae and she had no idea which ones were T11 and L1.

“You about done in there?” said Aoki-sensei and Kyoko quickly shook the thoughts from her head. 

She belted the hospital gown and stepped out of the curtain. 

 

The scan itself took about half an hour of going into a metal doughnut, stopping, listening to a strange clicking noise, and going out of the metal doughnut, going back in and repeating the process all over again. Sometimes Aoki-sensei voice came over a speaker system, asking her to roll to the left or right and sometimes he actually came into the room to rearrange her but, otherwise, Kyoko just had to lie very, very still and go in and out of the tube.

She had been apprehensive at first. After all, she’d only ever seen the huge contraption in movies and dramas. And then, for the first ten minutes, she had been excited. She was trying something new! Surely this would be great material for her acting at some point; maybe if she ever got cast in a medical drama. But then the scan went on. Go in. Stop. Come out. Stop. Go in… over and over again until all Kyoko wanted to do was be finished with it.

She never entered the tube deeper than her shoulders. Aoki-sensei was trying to avoid the titanium pins in her spine appearing in the scan. 

Then, at last, she was done. The nurse helped her get changed back into her regular clothes and showed her to the waiting room again where she sat with her hands on her knees for the next ten minutes. The frowning teenage boy was gone -- he’d probably been called for his own scan -- and the room was empty except for Kyoko.  

After those ten minutes of nervous waiting, Aoki-sensei called her back into his consultation room. 

“I can only give you a basic overview at the moment. I haven’t had too close a look yet, I’ve really only checked to make sure they all came out okay. I’ll send the full report over to your referring doctor in a week or so -- unless you’d rather come back here for the results?”

Kyoko thought of all the people flooding into and out of the hospital and then she thought of Yamada-sensei’s little clinic and it’s quiet, private waiting room. 

She shook her head.

“Right,” said Aoki. “Referring doctor it is. Now, the scans. The good news is: you haven’t had a brain haemorrhage. You’d be dead by now if you had -- well, if you'd had a significant one, anyway. So, no bleeding, I can’t see any immediate signs of recent damage either -- not even any lasting damage from your crash. The bad news is: I can’t see why you would have lost your memories. There’s no physical reason why --”

“My crash?” Kyoko had to interrupt. “What crash?”

Aoki-sensei didn’t even look up from the tablet in his hands on which her interactive scans were. “Oh that? I meant the car crash you were in when you were seventeen. It was a pretty big deal at the time.”

Kyoko frowned, trying to remember anything. “I was in a car crash?”

_ Is that why I have metal pins in my spine? _

Aoki did look up then. He scratched his ear pensively. “Could that be where her memories fail?” he muttered to himself. “What’s the last thing you remember before you woke-up as a twenty-six year old, Hizuri-san?”

“I was going home from the TBM studios,” said Kyoko clearly. This part was easy. She remembered this part. “Tsu-- Ren-san had offered me a lift and I was going home.”

“Do you remember the date? The time of year? Anything like that?”

Kyoko thought for a moment. “It was cold,” she said. “I think it might have been November, sometime.”

“How incredible…” said Aoki, scribbling notes in the margins of the scans with a stylus. 

Kyoko wondered whether you were allowed to write on the scans like that. They just seemed like one of those things you weren’t supposed to write on. Like bus signs and other people’s textbooks. 

“So, she has the crash, falls into a coma for two weeks, wakes up, recovers and lives a perfectly ordinary life -- well, as ordinary as Hizuri Kyoko’s life can be -- for nine years and then… poof! Incredible. Is it some sort of delayed onset trauma? Maybe there is scar tissue after all and I just missed it. There could always be tearing around the scarring or degeneration in the surrounding tissue. If it’s necrosis it might show up better on an MRI, though… If that’s the case, we’ll have to get that done soon.” He checked the scans again, seemingly to have completely forgotten Kyoko was there. “No, everything’s all healed up prettily. I have no idea. Isn’t that remarkable?”

“Uh, Aoki-sensei?” said Kyoko and he looked up, eyes shining with wonder. 

“Don’t you think that’s remarkable, Hizuri-san? Because memories don’t work like this! They aren’t laid down in your brain chronologically. It’s not like the memories from after the crash were stored  _ on top  _ of the older tissue and connections or anything. They’re just there in your in your limbic system, tucked away right alongside all your memories from  _ before  _ the crash. They’re all stored through exactly the same procedure, even if some of them go into short-term memory and some into long… And sure it could be that new connections were weaker after the crash but I don't remember there being any listed memory problems prior to this. So! Why is it that only  _ those  _ specific memories are gone? Why that particular break? And why now? It’s like it’s been timestamped. I hadn’t even considered that this could just happen out of the blue! I wonder… would you mind if I used you as a case study?”

“I don’t think LME’s PR department would be very happy with either of us, if you did,” said Kyoko firmly. She was getting sick of the jargon. All she was hearing was that her memories could very well go ‘poof!’ again at any time since there was no reason they’d done it in the first place. “Aoki-sensei, could you… could you just tell me about the crash? You have my medical history there, don’t you?”

“Oh, I don’t need your medical history for that. It was all over the news.”

“It was?”

“Oh, yeah. It caused quite a scandal. People wanted to know why you were even in Tsuruga Ren’s car in the first place.”

Kyoko’s mouth went dry. “Tsu- Tsuruga-san was in the crash, too?” She was so shocked she didn’t even think to change the way she called him.

“Did I not mention that?”

“No,” said Kyoko. 

What was it about this car crash -- this car crash in particular? Because it had to be specific to this crash, otherwise Aoki-sensei wouldn’t be getting so excited. And it was only this one crash that had caused the people involved to have sudden and unexplained amnesia well after they had recovered. Why? 

She thought to tell Aoki-sensei that Tsuruga-san was missing his memories as well but didn’t. It would only send him off on another jargon-filled monologue. 

“Is that why he married me? Because of the scandal?” she asked quietly instead, remembering her first suspicions.

“What? No, of course not!” said Aoki-sensei. “There was a bit of hubbub for a while but then Tsuruga’s manager and the president of LME came and sorted everything out. You two were just friends. He was mentoring you. And you’d just happened to run into each other at the studio when you’d both finished for the day. Besides, by the time you woke up, there was that whole thing about Maruyama Rumi that the press was obsessed with. What was that about again? I’ve completely forgotten.”

“So,” said Kyoko, hoping to cut off his tangent quickly. “What happened? Was it a bad crash? I thought I heard you say something about a coma.”

Aoki let out a long breath. “It was pretty bad. A long-haul truck driver fell asleep at the wheel, went through a red light and crashed straight into you. I remember them saying you would never walk again -- though that might have just been media hype. Then again, you do have those pins your spine. There could have been a fracture there or something… hang on, let me check the history, after all.” He turned to the computer and tapped a few keys. “Do you still have that card?” he asked absently. By closing Hizuri Kyoko’s file, he’d locked himself out of it again. 

Kyoko pulled it out of her purse wordlessly and handed it over. Aoki scanned it, handed it back and then resumed clicking. “Oh wow,” he said. “There’s some pretty nasty stuff in here. Did you know that one of your ribs broke so badly it tore a hole in your parietal pleura? That is a  _ bad  _ break.”

Kyoko had no idea what a parietal pleura was but she nodded all the same. If it was enough to shock Aoki-sensei, it had to be extreme.

“You could have pierced a lung,” he said solemnly.

That Kyoko  _ did  _ understand. She was suddenly glad that -- if she had to be in a car crash -- she’d been in a car crash with Tsuruga Ren. There was no doubt about it; the ambulance must have hurried. And then she felt immediately guilty. That really wasn’t fair to Tsuruga-san.

“And there’s some other, minor injuries in here. A couple of broken fingers. A dislocated shoulder. General abrasions… Anyway,” said Aoki-sensei, quickly moving on, “onto your spine… yep… yep… looks like you’re one lucky duck.” He looked up at Kyoko from the screen with a look of serenity on his face and she just  _ knew _ he was about to say something ridiculous with the complete and incorrect assurance that she would understand everything. “Well, the T11 is… meh, not that serious. It’s just an extension fracture, common in car crashes. A seat-belt fracture. And your L1 is totally fine, other than the metal rod that’s been surgically implanted into it. The pins are really only bracing for the bad fracture in your T12. Wow-ee. That one’s a doozy. I mean, fractures in the area where the lumbar region and the thoracic region meet are already a dangerous sort but you just went ahead and had an axial burst fracture with significant comminution right there in the T12! Talk about walking on the wild side! I won’t bore you with the procedure, it’s a bit technical,” he said as if everything else he’d just said wasn’t technical. “But I can tell you, that was no media hype. You’re lucky you can still walk.”

Kyoko didn’t know what to say to that. All she knew was, she was glad for that very technical procedure. She was glad she could still walk. She rubbed her hands up and down her quads in appreciation and promised to thank her T12 vertebra every day for the rest of her life for not shattering in such a way that she was wheelchair bound. 

“And,” she said hesitantly, “why did you expect scarring on my brain?”

“Ah…” he said, looking away from the history and back at her scan. “I’d say that’s what put you in the coma, if I was any expert -- and I am. Even without looking at the history I can tell you there would have been some bleeding in there. Considering that it was a truck that hit you. Though, it looks like it’s healed up okay and…” He swivelled in his chair back to the history. “Yeah, there’s no mention of you having any memory problems or motor failure or anything like that once you completed rehab. Like I said: one lucky duck.”

_ No memory problems until now _ , she thought. 

“That does sound like the case,” said Kyoko aloud. Then she stood up. “Thank you, Aoki-sensei.” She bowed.

Aoki bowed slightly in his seat as well. “If I can’t find anything else in the scans, I might request you come back and we’ll do some with a contrast agent.”

Kyoko, again, didn’t know what he meant, but she bowed all the same. She thanked Aoki-sensei one last time for everything. Then she walked out of the consultation room, out of radiology, paid at the front desk, kept walking out of the hospital, into Akechi-san’s waiting car and was grateful for every step she took along the way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, I didn't really have time to read through this chapter too closely. I'm already being told to hurry up and get in the car so let's keep this brief.
> 
> So, there's little bit more acting -- what did you think? How are you liking Ushio?   
> And then we get straight into all the medical mumbo-jumbo that has me living with my anatomy and physiology textbook beside me bed. I swear I was fine right through parietal pleura. It was only when we got to spinal vertebrae that I had to start looking stuff up. Biology is only my minor so I feel a bit out of my depth here. And there's a massive difference between biology and medical science. I'm a writing student, dammit, what am I doing here?   
> What I'm saying is: apologies if any of this is wrong, it's the result of about twenty minutes of mad googling.   
> How did you Aoki-sensei? To be honest, I really like him. He's a massive dork. I had this idea that he ended up in radiology because his bedside manner was so bad that he couldn't work in paediatrics. Poor guy. 
> 
> Anyway, I should go. We start really, properly getting into the next arc next chap so look forward to that! Until next week,  
> Ocean.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just because it's Christmas doesn't mean it's not Sunday. Merry Christmas to those of you that celebrate it and, for those of you that don't, I hope you've had a brilliant weekend and are enjoying your holidays :)  
> (sorry it's a bit later in the day than I would usually post, though. I had family stuff to do.)

Fukuda Aiko, receptionist at the front desk of Tokyo’s Yamase General Hospital, was excited when she got home from work. Her girlfriend, Hirose Natsu, could tell as soon as she came in. Aiko was usually very careful to be quiet when she came in. She often worked late hours and she didn’t want to wake Nacchan. But, that night, she came bursting through the door, keys jangling, shoes clattering on the ground as she shoved them off her feet. The door made a loud ‘clack’ as the spring-loaded closing mechanism pulled it shut. 

Usually, Aiko shut it herself. 

Luckily, Natsu was still awake, sitting cross-legged on the couch with the TV on, the volume turned way down, as she finished the draft of a short story she was supposed to discuss with her editor the next day. 

“Nacchan!” Aiko whisper-shouted from the entrance. “Nacchan, are you still awake?”

_ Well, I would be after all that noise,  _ thought Natsu. 

“On the couch!” she called back quietly.

She heard running, stomping feet as Aiko hurried through the kitchen to her girlfriend’s side. 

“You are not going to believe who came into the hospital today,” Aiko said loudly, sliding to her knees beside the couch and resting her chin on the armrest.

Natsu had to hush her. “Ai-chan, try and be a bit quieter. It’s late and you’ll wake the neighbours.”

“Right. Sorry,” said Aiko contritely before switching to a hushed voice. “But Nacchan, you’re never going to guess who it was.”

“I’m sure I won’t,” said Natsu, re-reading the same passage in her draft for the fourth time. There was something awkward about the phrasing and she just couldn’t work out what it was. 

“Try, though,” said Aiko. “Try and guess.”

Natsu sighed and pushed her laptop off her lap onto the empty couch cushion beside her. She wasn’t going to get any more work done that night. She’d have to get up early to finish it.

“Let’s see,” she said with a sigh. “Was it your mum?”

“Nope.”

“ _ My  _ mum?”

“Still nope.”

“That creepy guy from the bar last week?”

“Ew. But nope.”

“Was it… the queen of England?”

Aiko laughed and slapped Natsu playfully on the arm. “Nope. Nope. Nope,” she said. “Alright I’ll just tell you. It was Kyoko-san!”

“My sister, Kyoko? Or was it Ichikawa Kyoko from high school?”

“It was Hizuri Kyoko!”

Natsu stared blankly at her girlfriend for a second. Then her eyes slid to the TV that was still playing the last episode of  _ My House is Yours  _ from their joint-owned box set _. _

“No. Way.”

“Yes way!” Aiko squeaked. She pulled Natsu’s laptop off the couch and placed it on the coffee table so she could sit down. “I scanned her card and everything. At first I didn’t recognise her, since she was in disguise, but there it was, right on the screen, telling me the patient was ‘Hizuri Kyoko’ and she was there for brain scans with Aoki-sensei.”

“No way!” said Natsu again. “You must have read it wrong. I was always better than you at kanji.”

“I didn’t read it wrong! It really was her!”

“Alright! Alright, I believe you. Wow, that’s incredible, Ai-chan! The real-life Kyoko-san…”

Aiko nodded three times quickly and then they both just sat in silence, thinking about how small the world was.

“I wonder why she was getting brain scans,” said Natsu quietly after a long time.

 

***

 

Kyoko was fiddling with the TV again. It was almost midnight but she just couldn’t go to bed before she knew everything about her accident. Her phone was too slow, she needed a proper computer but the one in the study had a password so she was stuck with trying to remember how she made that keyboard pop out the first time.

At last, she got it. It was wireless so she picked it up and returned to the couch, switching the screen from ‘Television Mode’ to ‘Browser Mode’ with the remote as she went. There was another switch, a physical switch, on the back of remote. One side said ‘TV control’ the other said ‘cursor’ so she flicked the switch to cursor and pointed it at the TV. As promised, a cursor appeared by the magic of some invisible laser. 

With her bottom lip between her teeth in concentration, Kyoko clicked on the search bar and typed ‘Tsuruga Ren Kyoko car accident’, thought for a moment, and then added ‘November’ and the year that she turned seventeen. 

A wave of results turned up. She ignored the most recent ones -- they appeared to just be embarrassing collections of photos of them together with captions like ‘together forever’ and ‘gotta love the OTP’ -- and went for the older news articles. The first one she tried said that they’d both died in the crash and there would be a state funeral held the following Thursday. 

Kyoko hit the back button. 

The next article sounded like it had been written by Aoki-sensei. It was filled with every single medical detail that the journalist could get their hands on without any explanation of what any of it meant.

Kyoko hit ‘back’ again.

The third article was just right in the sense that it was complete trash from some gossip magazine. A photo of the crash took up most of the screen. She recognised the twisted remains of Tsuruga-san’s silver porche and felt a bit like she was going to throw up. She’d been in there, trapped in the middle of all that broken glass and twisted metal. She had been inside when that luxury car went from smooth ride to death trap in a matter of seconds. The truck that had smashed into them was still crushed against the side of the car. They were stitched to one another as their broken parts tangled together. 

The picture sat under the title ‘ _ Secret Love Revealed Only By Tragic Accident _ ’ and the horrible, sick feeling was flushed away by Kyoko’s blush. 

It looked like the article had been written only the day after the accident. There were mentions of ‘fighting for their lives’ and ‘shining young careers cut tragically short’ and then they got right into the speculation. Why was  _ Dark Moon _ ’s Kyoko in Tsuruga Ren’s car? Were they secretly dating? How long had they been dating? Was this why there had been no rumours of Tsuruga-san ever having a relationship before? But Kyoko was still underage. Was Tsuruga Ren a pedophile? 

Kyoko smashed her head against the coffee table at that last question. The shame! The mortification! How could she have brought such a thing onto Tsuruga-san? After all the things he’d done for her, this was how she repaid him? By making him out to be a pedophile? No wonder the president had been called in to smooth out the situation. This wasn’t the sort of accusation that could be fixed just by telling people they were friends. Especially when they weren’t even friends! He was her most respected sempai! She would never dare to --

She pulled herself to a sudden stop.

But she had, hadn’t she? At some point, she had dared to think of him as more than a sempai. She’d even married him. And, just when she had returned to her senses, he’d gone and said that he loved her. He’d said it first. Without prompting. Was she still such a disgrace if she hadn’t been the one to break the sempai/kohai relationship? She had never  _ asked  _ for more, had she?

But, then, did that mean Tsuruga-san was the disgrace? He had been the one to break the relationship, after all.

No! No, he wasn’t. She refused to think of him as such. But, if he wasn’t a disgrace and she wasn’t a disgrace, even though ‘love’ had been thrown into their relationship… why had Kyoko fought for so long to bury those feelings?

She shook her head and forced herself to read through the comments on the article. Anything to stop that train of thought. 

Most of them were things like ‘This is disgusting. Two people have just been involved in a serious accident! They might not survive. Their lives will never be the same and all this journalist wants to do is find out if they were sleeping together? Revolting. I’m unsubscribing,’ but, here and there, there were comments like, ‘Dude, chill out. It’s just a gossip rag. If you can’t handle the moral dilemma, I don’t know why you subscribed in the first place.’

Kyoko read them slowly, steadily, filling her head with nonsense until her previous thoughts were all washed away.

 

***

 

This time, Kyoko was very aware of the cell phones that took sneaky shots, from under elbows and over shoulders and behind bag straps, as she stood in the international airport arrivals lounge. She just didn’t care. Chances were, they were going to get some ‘exclusive’ shot anyway so why bother trying to stop them?

So she just stood there in her form-hugging jeans and her white heels with the peep-toe and a bow, dressed as Tsuruga Ren’s Wife again, and let them take all the photos they liked. Her attention was on an empty corridor. Down that corridor was a gate. And she knew that, right that second, the gate was preparing to welcome an incoming flight from Kuching. 

She glanced up at the monitor over her head. The tag next to Tsuruga-san’s flight said ‘landed’ but didn’t have any other information. 

So she just kept on waiting, ignoring the small shutter sounds that kept going off around her.

 

There was a light atmosphere around the  _ Convictions  _ staff. They were all overflowing with happiness at having finally finished the emotionally exhausting days of filming filled with screams and tears and Tsuruga Ren pleading with them for mercy. They were all just really glad to be home. Yashiro walked along in a little bubble of happiness at the thought that he would get to watch his favourite couple reunite in just a few minutes. The director wouldn't stop talking about how he couldn’t wait to get into the editing room.

“That last take, Tsuruga-kun,” he was saying. “Oh! I still have goosebumps. I can’t wait to see how it’ll look all cut together. We’ll have the audience in tears, I’m sure!”

Ren just smiled pleasantly, slid his sunglasses off the top of his head and pushed them onto his face. He was abuzz with anticipation and fear. On one hand, he couldn’t wait to see Kyoko again -- especially after that amazing phone call that changed everything. On the other, he couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d come to her senses, decided against everything and had just been too polite to tell him over the phone. But, even if she had, she would never force him into that sort of scene in the middle of the airport. He had no doubt she’d be in full-on Tsuruga Ren’s Wife mode and she was too professional to intentionally break character over something as mundane as love. He’d be able to pull her into his arms and fill his lungs with her scent and believe she loved him at least once. 

Who knows what would happen after that. 

He walked through customs in a daze and security was a complete blur. All he could think of was who would be waiting for him at the end of his journey. 

The staff turned a final corner and the arrivals lounge appeared. The press had arrived. They were still setting up cameras and sound equipment so they couldn’t have been there long. There were a few members of the public, some who knew what was happening and some who had just seen a crowd forming and stuck around to see what was going on. 

And then there was her.

She was beautiful. She was always beautiful but two weeks away had done a great deal to corrode the resistance Ren had built up against her. She was maybe a little too dressed up for the airport but that seemed to be the character she’d created. It didn't stop Ren from wanting to hide her away from the world while she was wearing those jeans, though. 

She stood quietly towards the back of the room, against a wall with her hands clasped in front of her and her back ramrod straight. Her huge, bug-eyed sunglasses kept slipping down her nose and she pushed them up again stubbornly. She’d slipped out of character for a moment. As he watched, she frowned, shifted her weight so it was all on one hip and looked up with a confident smile; her character perfectly restored. 

Ren smiled at the sight. He loved seeing her unguarded and he loved seeing her act. This was both. He didn’t say anything. He just navigated his way through the crowd towards her as discreetly as he could. She still saw him coming, though, and smiled, taking half a step forward. Ren was before her in three steps. He pulled her into his arms wordlessly and they clung to each other in silence for thirty seconds or so while the press finally got their act together and flashes started going off. 

Ren ignored them. Instead, he revelled in the feeling of her tiny hands balling up the fabric of his shirt as she pulled herself against him. And her gentle warmth seeping into his heart again. And the way she fit so perfectly in his arms. You couldn’t feel any of that over the phone. He noticed all this, held onto the feeling, and then, at last, he spoke.

“God, I’ve missed you,” he whispered.

She didn’t reply. She just nodded and buried her face deeper in his chest.

_ How much of this is real and how much is for the cameras? _ asked Ren’s heart but he ignored it. 

Nothing was going to ruin this moment. 

Finally, he pulled away to look at her face. He pushed her sunglasses up on her head to get a better view and the camera flashes intensified for a moment. 

“You look tired,” he said worriedly. “How have you been? Are you healthy?”

She laughed and he felt her hands tighten into fists where they still rested on his arms, tugging at his shirt again. 

“I’m fine, Ren-san,” she said.

He’d missed her voice. It just wasn’t the same over the phone. 

“I’ve just been busy. Now,” she said, looking around at the press and the cast of  _ Convictions _ , some of whom had been pulled into interviews already, “let’s get your luggage and go home. Akechi-san’s waiting with the car just outside.” She looked around again. “Where’s Yashiro-san?”

Ren rolled his eyes. “Oh, he’ll be here somewhere. He wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

 

***

 

The car ride was tense. They were stuck between characters. The public personas had fallen away in the privacy of the car but they still weren’t entirely themselves. There was no way either of them would be comfortable really  _ talking  _ while their managers were right there. To make matters worse, Yashiro kept turning around in his seat to smirk at them.

“Yashiro-kun!” admonished Nao quietly. “Stop that!”

Yashiro faced forward again for about ten seconds before he had to turn around and take another peek. Nao fixed him with a glare. He turned back to the front.

“Sorry, Nao-san,” he mumbled. 

They stopped at a set of lights and Kyoko said, “Just here is fine, Akechi-san.”

“You're getting out?” Ren asked. 

Kyoko nodded.

“Are you sure, Kyoko-chan?” asked Nao. “It’s still a fair way to the studio.”

“But it’s much faster for you to get to our apartment if you don’t have to take this turn,” reasoned Kyoko.

Kyoko watched Akechi-san frown in the rearview mirror.

“Really, Akechi-san,” she said. “I’ll be fine. Take Tsuruga-san home. I’m sure he’s tired.”

“You’re not coming home?” he asked, reinforcing Kyoko’s point by only catching up to the conversation just then.

“I have a chemistry test for a commercial and then an audition later,” explained Kyoko. “I’ll be home around ten.”

Ren felt his heart fall. She wasn’t coming home.

Kyoko looked back to the rearview mirror where Akechi-san was still frowning.

“Alright,” Nao finally relented. “But take that hat off the parcel shelf and bring it with you. It would be a nightmare if you were late because someone recognised you.”

Kyoko nodded, grabbed the hat and went to get out of the car. 

“I’ll take him home,” Nao called through the window after her, carefully avoiding using Ren’s name, “and then meet you there. Don’t sign anything without me.”

Kyoko nodded again just as the lights changed and Nao had to drive away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm really not happy with the end of this chapter. I think I rewrote it about four times and, in the end, I just gave up. It's impossible.   
> So! Here's where the real OCs start to appear frequently. Rather than all the characters that are being acted, which may as well be OCs when you think about it. To tell the truth, I wasn't thinking of Skip Beat Natsu when I named Hirose Natsu. She's actually named after Hinata's sister from Haikyuu!! because she's a cutie-pie. I like to think, though, that Hirose Natsu started really following Kyoko because of Kitazawa Natsu and the fact that Hirose's sister is also named Kyoko is thrown in there just to add to the coincidence. 
> 
> Okay, feel free to skip this paragraph; it's just me rambling about my life.   
> I feel obliged to say Merry Christmas again. Did you all have a good December 25th (regardless of how you spent it)? We're all pretty solidly atheist in my family, except my brother-in-law, so ours is always a very commercial christmas. My aunt arrived over two hours late, I ate so much I puked and then we took the dogs to the lake for a swim because it's about three trillion degrees here (and will be for the next week, apparently). So, overall, it was a pretty average Christmas. The beach was... well, kind of sucky. The first day was good but then I got bitten by an ant and, being allergic to pretty much all bites and stings, that meant I spent the whole rest of the trip horizontal as my lymph nodes overreacted and limited circulation to my extremities. Not so much fun. There were more than a few frustrated tears shed that week ('why can't my feet just support my weight without feeling like they're going to explode?').  
> But now that Christmas is over, I can start saving up to finally get my laptop fixed! Give me a month, maybe a week or so more, and I should be set. And then I'll have to scrounge and scrimp and borrow to afford textbooks for next year... Oh, why can't I just have infinite money?
> 
> Anyway, I hope you liked the update. I think I've finally hit a block on writing this. My copy is up to chapter 22 so there'll still be regular updates for a while but just be warned. I wanted to write more at the coast but it's hard to do so when your hands are swollen... I hope you liked Natsu and Aiko and will like the other OCs to come.   
> I'll see you all next week!  
> Ocean.
> 
> (P.S I watched Yuri!!! on Ice and am now just a ball of emotions)


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Why am I trying so hard to limit swearing in this fic when I write scenes like this, again? Warning: there's bit a of kissing and that in this chap.

Hirose Natsu sat at a cafe with her editor in silence. She sipped slowly at her scalding hot coffee and stared out the window, taking note of strangers and their unique peculiarities. Who knows, maybe one day she’d include one of them in some story or another. 

Her editor, Koyama, had his nose practically pressed up to the screen of Natsu’s laptop, reading the draft of her short story. 

At last Koyama leant back with a satisfied sigh and Natsu had to tear her eyes away from people watching. 

“This is good, Hirose-sensei,” he said. “I think we’ve finally worked out all the major kinks. There’s still that one passage towards the end -- the one where your main character makes the decision to take her own life? -- that I think still needs a bit of work, though. It seems a rather drastic step for her to take. Try and run through her thought process again. It has to seem logical while, in reality, being an entirely emotional decision.”

He pushed the laptop over the table to Natsu and she had a look at the passage in question. She understood what he was trying to say but that passage had her favourite sentence in the whole story in it and she didn’t want to cut it. 

Eventually, though, she nodded and shut the laptop. Koyama picked up his tea and drank, smoothly transitioning from ‘editor’ to the ‘friend’ he’d been since college. 

“So, how have you been since we last spoke?” he said. 

“Oh, alright,” said Natsu, taking another sip of coffee. “Been losing a bit of sleep over  _ this  _ thing.” She patted her hand on the lid of her closed laptop. “Otherwise fine. You?”

His face dropped and he sighed. Natsu knew this is what he had really wanted to talk about in the first place. He just needed someone to vent to. 

“I think Emi wants to break up with me,” he said.

“Oh my God! Why?”

He sighed again, his shoulders slumping. “She said I was boring. And she’s almost never home anymore -- always out with ‘friends’. When she  _ is  _ home, we do nothing but argue. It kind of fell apart around me before I even realised there were cracks in it.”

Natsu frowned. She didn’t want to tell Koyama but she thought it would probably be for the best if they did break up, if that’s how their relationship worked.

“Don’t look at me like that,” said Koyama and Natsu blinked. She must have been more obvious than she thought. “I know, I  _ know _ . Things would be easier for the both of us if we just called it a day but that doesn’t mean I want to. We’ve been together for almost three years. I really thought… Well, I’d really hoped she loved me more than this.”

Natsu shook her head. “I really don’t know what to say, Koyama-kun. I’m sorry.”

Koyama took a deep breath, obviously pulling himself back together, and then he gave her a crooked smile. Natsu’s heart broke for him. He wasn’t taking this well. Not that there really was a way to take the breakdown of a relationship well.

“Anyway! Enough about me!” he said pointedly. “How’s Ai-san?”

Natsu took his cue to leave the matter behind and let him change the topic. It seemed he was done venting for the moment. 

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, she’s the same as always. Bubbly and bright and shining happiness into everyone’s --” 

Koyama had the most heartbroken expression on his face and Natsu stopped. 

“Ah, she’s good,” she corrected herself. “She was all excited the other day because Hizuri Kyoko came to the hospital.”

“Hizuri Kyoko? Is she the one from  _ Concrete Jungle _ ?” he asked.

“She's in that?” She raised her eyebrows in surprise. It was often hard to keep track of Kyoko-san when her face was so flexible.

Koyama laughed. It sounded too hollow to Natsu’s ears.

“I don’t know,” he said. “You tell me. You’re the one who, I’m sure, has the box set.”

Natsu  _ did _ have the box set of  _ Concrete Jungle  _ but she didn't want to mention it. She had the feeling Koyama had been trying to make a joke. 

“Well, I know her best from  _ My House is Yours _ but she’s been in tons of things. Like  _ Ten Men, Ten Colours _ and that one about the man who comes back to life -- oh, what was it called?  _ Try, Try Again!  _ That’s right. That's what it was. Of course, she was also in  _ Dark Moon _ and --”

“I know that one!” interrupted Koyama. “I remember watching it as a college student with my parents when it came out. Who was she in that?”

Natsu looked smug for a moment. “Mio,” she said after a pause.

“Really? That terrifying Mio? Well, maybe it wasn’t the same actress in  _ Concrete Jungle,  _ then…”

“I actually wouldn’t be surprised if it was,” said Natsu. “Kyoko-san has the most changeable face out of all the actors I’ve seen. Now that I think about it, she has a new movie coming out this week.” 

Natsu looked out the window again at the billboards and neon signs and televisions that advertised everything from skin cream to tinned meat until she found what she was looking for. 

“Ah! There!” she said, pointing Koyama’s face in the direction of a TV screen bolted to the side of a building that showed a poster; purple background with a group of people standing over the ball of red string that tumbled across the bottom, all the way from left to right. It was, of course, the poster for Kyoko’s most recently completed work. 

“ _ The Threads that Connect Us _ ,” said Natsu proudly, as if it was her movie and not her idol’s. “The premiere’s on Friday. I can’t wait until it’s in cinemas.”

Koyama laughed again and, this time, it sounded a little less hollow. “Okay, I get it!” he said, still laughing. “She’s a big deal and you love her a lot.”

“I love her acting a lot,” Natsu corrected. 

“Right, you love her acting a lot. So what was she doing at the hospital? Was it some charity thing?”

“No, apparently she was a patient. Ah, maybe I shouldn’t be telling you this. Doctor-patient confidentiality and all that.”

Koyama rolled his eyes. “Since when were you a doctor?”

Natsu looked conflicted for a moment. This was her favourite actress, after all. She didn’t want to drop her in hot water. But he was right. She wasn’t bound to secrecy in any real way. And Ai-chan had told her first anyway so it mustn’t be a big deal. It wasn’t like Koyama was going to tell anyone. He was her friend.

“Well,” she started hesitantly… 

 

***

 

It was late and Kyoko was exhausted. She closed the door quietly and kicked her shoes off. She stared at them there, lying on their side on the tiles, and considered just leaving them. She’d have to put them back on in the morning anyway. But she heard the voice of the Okami-san of Fuwa ryokan in her ear, telling her to always be careful to maintain appearances, and she gave in. She righted the shoes and put them back in their place on the rack. It was only when she looked up again that she saw the living room light was still on. 

She frowned. It was past midnight. She was hours past her ten o'clock estimate. Tsuruga-san had been up since at least six in order to catch his flight. He had to get straight back into his busy schedule tomorrow. He really shouldn’t still be up. Someone as professional as Tsuruga-san wouldn’t risk their performance with lack of sleep. Maybe he’d fallen asleep with the light on. That made the most sense.

She quietly padded down the hall into the living room. Tsuruga-san was not asleep. He was sitting on the edge of the couch with his head in his hands. 

Quiet as she was, he still heard her coming and looked up.

“I’m home,” whispered Kyoko. It somehow didn’t feel right to talk any louder.

A heart-melting smile spread across his face. “Welcome home.”

“You’re still up,” she observed. 

“Yes,” he said. “It didn’t feel right, going to bed without talking to you first.”

Kyoko stood there on the hardwood floor, her feet bare, and didn’t move. She expected him to go on, to say whatever he needed to say so badly he’d waited up for her. But he didn’t. He just stared back at her.

He swallowed awkwardly. “Ah… Come sit down,” he said at last, gesturing towards the seat next to him.

Kyoko did. Then she turned and looked at him again. What could he be about to say? It had to be serious. He looked upset. Maybe he was dying. Oh God, what if he was dying?

“Are you going to die?” Kyoko blurted out suddenly.

Tsuruga-san looked understandably shocked. “What? No, no I’m fine. Fit and healthy, other than the memory-loss. No, I just wanted to say-- Before we went to sleep I just thought I should make sure that I didn’t imagine that conversation.”

“Which conversation?” asked Kyoko.

Ren’s face fell. She didn’t remember. Maybe he  _ had _ imagined it. He had been pretty tired and he was upset that he’d said the wrong thing. Maybe it was all a dream and his brain had just let him hear what he needed to hear in order to lay his worries to rest.

No. No, her attitude had changed. It was only subtle but it had definitely changed after that conversation. It had happened. It was real. He was sure of it. He just needed a little confirmation. 

And her face right then. She was looking away, entirely too innocently, the blush that he was sure would have covered her cheeks was hidden carefully under a layer of acting. She remembered. He’d just left her to her own thoughts for too long and she’d already convinced herself that conversation meant something other than what it had.

“Kyoko-chan?” he said, taking her hands. 

She nodded softly, staring at their intertwined fingers. 

“I want to say it again. In person. Face to face. It’s only fair.”

She didn’t look up so he cupped her chin with one hand and tilted her face towards his. She flinched a little at his touch and looked confused. He tried not to let it sting his heart too much. He felt his fingers drift away from her chin, ghosting along the soft skin of her jaw and reaching up behind her ear into her silky hair. He let his thumb remain on her cheekbone, gently stroking it as Kyoko stopped looking so confused and started looking more worried. 

“I love you.” He said it softly and suddenly and Kyoko’s face flooded with understanding. “I didn’t imagine that conversation, did I?”

He watched her swallow and chew her lip. She tried to look away but his hand kept her where she was and her eyes locked on his. 

Haltingly, she shook her head. “N-no.” Her voice caught when she spoke. 

“And is your answer still the same?”

She nodded her head ever so slightly.

“Can I kiss you now?” asked Ren. He'd been wanting to all day but he wouldn't allow himself to actually go for it until he'd confirmed everything with her one more time. 

Kyoko flushed deep red but nodded again.

He licked his lips quickly, almost unintentionally, as his gaze dropped to her mouth. The pressure of his hand on the back of her head increased as he drew her towards him. Their noses bumped and Kyoko let out a small, nervous giggle. So Ren did it again to see if he could get the same result. 

And then they were kissing. Innocently, like children. He tucked her top lip between both of his and pressed. And then he withdrew. A cold stream of air flowed between them as Ren pulled away from her. 

But then Kyoko chased after him and reason went to the wind. 

His other hand joined the first in her hair. Pulling her against him. Lips clashed and then softened. They sucked and pulled and moved in rhythm. Kyoko made a small sound of surprise when she felt his teeth graze her lower lip. 

Ren took a sharp breath through his nose and got nothing except a lungful of her. It only made him more desperate. His hands shifted to her neck, tilting her head back for easier access, and then they wandered on. Down the slope of her neck, over her shoulders until his arms could wrap around her waist and draw more of her towards him. Not just her lips. He needed all of her. He needed to feel her against him. He needed her warmth. Her hands were in his hair and heat shot through him when he felt her fingernails across his scalp.

Kyoko was the first to fully open her mouth, inviting Ren inside, and soon they were both probing and stroking and exploring. The sound Kyoko made when Ren ran his tongue across her teeth was half surprise, half moan. The sound Ren made when Kyoko’s tongue brushed the roof of his mouth was all moan.

That was it. That was the sound that made Kyoko pull back in shock. She knew what that noise meant. She’d heard it through the walls sometimes back at the Fuwa’s ryokan. She’d heard other girls gossiping about it in school. 

She stared at Ren. At his too-bright eyes and too-red mouth, at his mussed up hair and the saliva still coating his bottom lip. She had done that, she realised, a strange mix of pride and fear flowing through her veins. He looked like that because of her. His hot hands were on her waist because of her. A little voice in the back of her head was chanting ‘Plain and boring! Plain and boring!’ but she squashed it flat. Or rather, the look of absolute adoration in Ren’s eyes squashed it flat. 

Pride. Yes, she decided it was mainly pride she felt.

Ren gave a shy, lopsided smile. “Too much?” he murmured.

Kyoko shook her head resolutely. 

Ren chuckled. “Yes it was. You’re not saying anything.”

“I can’t,” Kyoko tried to say but it just came out as a squeak, reinforcing her point. 

Ren just kept smiling his goofy smile. His left hand was rubbing warm circles into her waist and his right had moved up to cup her face again.

“Sorry,” he whispered.

Kyoko shook her head again, even more resolute. He’d done nothing wrong. He didn’t need to apologise and she tried to tell him that. Words still failed her so she just tilted her head back again and placed a soft kiss on his mouth, like the one they’d first shared before desperation got involved.

He smiled against her lips momentarily before she pulled away.

“Don’t tempt me,” he growled jokingly but Kyoko still felt it in her gut. “Now, come on. We should both be getting to bed.”

She froze at the word ‘bed’. 

Ren stood up, her hand in his, but soon her arm pulled taut and he realised she was still sitting on the couch. He ran the words he’d just said back through his head quickly to check what had caused her to stop functioning. A conflicted expression crossed his face for a second before he knelt on the rug in front of her. 

“Kyoko-chan, I didn’t mean it like that. We’re just going to sleep. We both have work tomorrow and it’s late already,” he said.

Kyoko just sat there.

“Would you feel better if I slept in the study again?” he asked, face completely open.

That thawed her. She shook her head violently and tried her voice again.

“Don’t,” she said. Apparently she could form words again. “You need to sleep properly.”

“I know but if you’re uncomfortable with --”

“No,” said Kyoko again and her expression left no room for argument. 

Ren gave in with a sigh, took her other hand in his as well and guided her up off the couch. Then, together, they went off to bed where they were both so nervous, neither of them managed to sleep very deeply.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the record, my favourite sentence in this fic so far is: "It was far too ‘high school quarterback’ and he’d always been that nerdy, mixed-race kid in drama club with the famous parents." It's from chapter sixteen. And the pain of having to cut your favourite sentence is very real. With any luck, I can leave this one in there. 
> 
> I will never remember the difference between 'past' and 'passed'. I'll keep googling it for the rest of my life. 
> 
> Gosh, if someone had walked in on me writing that last scene... It was so pathetic. Me, sitting in bed when my laptop still worked being like, 'what the hell? How does kissing work again? I refuse to use the phrase "their tongues battled for dominance!" And since the last person I kissed was my best friend when neither of us were exactly in our right minds, there was a lot of hand kissing, writing furiously, more hand kissing... It was bad. As an apparent adult, forgetting kisses as soon as they're over is probably a problem. 
> 
> I actually almost didn't post a chapter today... I'm cat sitting my friend's kittens and they're so adorable I forgot reality existed. But, here I am once again! I really hope you liked this chapter. It's one of the ones that I'm really unsure of. I even tried to discuss it with my sister (without letting on that it was fanfiction...) but that didn't particularly help either. Anyway, hopefully it's alright. I'll see you next week!  
> Ocean.
> 
> [edit: I can't believe I forgot to say Happy New Year! Here's hoping 2017 is a little bit better than the shit storm (yes, I did search for a synonym for that but none quite did it justice) that we're leaving behind. Though, considering my desire to visit America is definitely being put off until 2020, that is unlikely.]


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The dress is here. Normally, I try not to go into too much detail with clothing (because it quickly becomes boring) but I might have gone a little overboard here. Forgive me?

Kihara Kanon had an aura of determined diligence about her as she trawled through the mountain of paperwork on her desk. This wasn’t exactly what she had in mind when she had applied for the job but everybody had to start somewhere, right? And she was going to run for office one day.

She stared down at the report immediately in front of her for a moment, flicked back several pages, circled something and then turned to her computer where she double checked some numbers against an email she had received earlier that day. Finally satisfied, she signed the bottom of the report, stamped it, and put it on the growing stack of ‘complete’ files to the left of her computer -- piled there where they couldn’t be bumped and scattered across the floor by a passerby. She’d learnt from her mistakes already. 

She took a long gulp of coffee from a travel mug to the right of her computer -- safely distanced from any paper in case of a spill -- and pulled the next report into the space in front of her. 

She frowned. This wasn’t her jurisdiction. It was about restricted access sanctions surrounding the area of the Fukushima disaster. She had nothing to do with this. 

She flipped back to the first page of the report.

“Ahh,” she said softly in understanding. 

It was addressed to Miyajima Hironori, her direct superior. It must have just ended up on her desk by accident.

She stood up to walk the report into his office. Just then, Onoda-kun came hurrying down between the cubicles and ran straight into her. Kanon made a mental note to always look both ways  _ twice  _ before she got up in future. 

She was obviously still too green at this to avoid accidents altogether. 

“Gosh, I’m so sorry, Kihara-san,” said Onoda. 

He looked at his watch quickly before he knelt to help her pick up Miyajima-san’s scattered report. 

“It’s fine, really,” she said. “If you’re in a rush, Onoda-kun, you don’t have to stay to help. I’ll be fine.”

He looked up, clearly relieved. “Really?” he asked. “Because I was supposed to be in a meeting three minutes ago and I don’t even know where the room is yet.”

Kanon let a snort of laughter escape her before she quickly covered her mouth with her hand. That wasn’t very lady-like. 

“Go on, then, Onoda-kun,” she said with a faked expression of serene calm on her face. “You better get going.”

“Thank you, Kihara-san,” he said. “Are you really sure that’s fine? I was the one who ran into you.”

Kanon smiled, face teetering on the edge of laughter at his clumsy panic. “Go!” she told him.

“Right. Right. I’m going. Thanks again, Kihara-san,” he bumbled his way out of the office, nearly knocking into someone else as he went. 

Kanon shook her head with a smile and turned back to the report scattered across the ground. 

The smile fell from her face as her eyes landed on one sheet of paper in particular. She pulled it out of the mess by a corner and read it quickly. 

She frowned, looked around the office to see everyone buried in their work, and slipped the paper back into the mess. She swept the report together, slipped it back into its manilla folder, and pushed it under the huge pile of unread paperwork on her desk, where no one would think to look for it.

 

“ _ Cut! _ ” shouted the director. “Wow. Just wow. Amazing, Kyoko-san, Sekine-kun. That was exactly what I was looking for.”

Kyoko bit her lip to control her blush at the excessive praise. “Th-thank you, Director,” she said. 

Sekine Seiichi, Onoda’s actor, looked at Kyoko proudly. “Only one take, Kyoko-san,” he said. “Well done.”

“A lot of it was thanks to you, Sekine-san,” she said. “It was easy to work off your acting.”

Seiichi folded with a sigh under the weight of Hizuri Kyoko’s famous modesty. “Let’s agree to say we both did well,” he said. 

“Agreed,” said Kyoko with a radiant smile and Seiichi thought he might be in real trouble if he had to work with her for too long. He only hoped he could hold himself together when Onoda and Kihara eventually became lovers. 

 

***

 

It was Friday evening and Kyoko had been filming since seven-thirty that morning. She was sweaty and sore and more tired than she had ever been in her life. Her week had been packed. Whenever she wasn’t filming for  _ Cross the Floor _ , she was doing TV interviews and magazine interviews and appearing as a guest on variety shows and cooking shows and every other sort of show you could think of, promoting her movie that was coming out the next week. The movie whose premiere she had to attend in a little over two hours. 

She came out of the shower, steaming and considerably more comfortable. She was clean again and the warmth had done a great deal to ease the stiffness in her muscles. 

She plodded happily across the bedroom floor, enjoying the feeling of the thick carpet between her bare toes, and into the closet where Akechi-san was waiting to help her get ready. 

Then she saw the dress she was expected to wear and all her muscles just cramped right up again.

It dangled from Akechi-san’s fingers so lightly it looked like it could be blown away on the breeze. It didn’t have straps. In fact, it barely had anything until the waist. 

“Do I really have to wear that?” asked Kyoko meekly.

“I’m afraid so,” said Nao. “You have a contract with Dia-MONDE and this is what they’ve sent you. You won't remember but you've even already had the fitting and signed off on the dress.”

Kyoko stared at the wisp of silk for a moment more before she sighed, defeated.

“That’s the spirit,” said Nao with a laugh. “Now come here. I need to tape this thing to your boobs because there's literally nothing else to hold it up.”

Ten minutes of gentle rustling and vigorous but invisible taping and Kyoko was in. The dress  _ was  _ beautiful, if she could ignore how much skin she was showing. 

It was a charcoal grey that shimmered under light and had a neckline that plunged so low between her breasts it reached all the way to her sternum. It was the sort of look that only really worked when the one wearing the dress had very little in the chest department. Kyoko was glad for the first time in her life to be nearly flat-chested. 

The torso was very fitted, it looked like gold leaf had been pasted on her skin and then painted grey. This was because, in a way, it had. The entire front of the torso was just one, flat sheet of silk, the back was non-existent. The fabric over her stomach and ribs was coated in some sort of sticky gel to paste it to her skin but the material over her breasts was just padded silk that hung completely untethered so that it had to be taped into position each time the dress was worn. Kyoko shivered as the chill air hit her naked back. The dress only appeared about fifteen centimetres above her tailbone, leaving everything else bare. 

At the waist, more layers joined the charcoal silk. All of them were grey and varied only slightly in shade but they each reflected light in a different way and the effect was stunning. The layers were ruffled and, together, they looked like smoke, swirling and gathering around her legs. The skirt was very short in the front, barely reaching mid-thigh, and very long in the back, almost touching the ground. 

Akechi-san handed Kyoko a pair of strappy, dark silver heels to go with it and she stepped into them, lacing them up extra-tight because they looked like the sort of shoes to break an ankle in. 

Overall, it was not an outfit to be worn almost anywhere except a movie premiere. It was flashy and sexy, a little controversial and a lot too silly for practical use. 

Just then, the two women heard the front door open and close.

“Ah, that must be Kuon-san,” said Nao. “He’ll have to hurry, though. There’s not much time before we have to leave.”

“I’m home!” came Tsuruga-san’s voice from the entrance, confirming Nao’s suspicions. 

Kyoko’s whole body burned bright red at the sound of his voice and the thought that he would be looking at her in a matter of minutes. She dropped into a ball on the floor, covering as much of her exposed skin as possible. 

“Now, come,” said Nao teasingly. “He’s going to see you sooner or later. You’re expected to arrive together.”

“Yes but I didn’t think he’d have to see me like this!” Kyoko whispered back fiercely.

Nao just laughed. 

“Hello? Kyoko?” Ren was still calling. 

Nao looked down at her charge, trying to curl up into a ball so tight she’d pop out of existence, and took pity on her.

“She’s still changing!” she called back to the confused man outside. “You should hurry up and get in the shower. We’re short on time as it is.”

“Okay,” Ren shouted back to her. 

“Is Yashiro-kun with you?” she asked.

“He’s gone to get something to eat for all of us.”

“Good idea,” said Nao and then she turned back to Kyoko on the ground.  “Alright, Kyoko-chan, let’s finish this. I still have to do your hair and makeup and we have to leave in half an hour to allow time for traffic.”

Reluctantly, Kyoko nodded and sat in the chair in front of the full-length mirror so Akechi-san could work her magic.

 

***

 

Ren was tempted to stand under the warm, pummelling water forever. He’d thought he’d have some spare time, now that he was finished filming for  _ Convictions _ , but Yashiro had filled all the space in his schedule with modelling and commercials, both of which were already squeezed around about four hundred auditions. 

He yawned and got a mouthful of shampoo, spat it out and stared at the tiled wall of the shower again. He knew he’d have to get out soon. There couldn’t be more than fifteen minutes left before ultra-organised Akechi bustled them all out of the apartment and into a car. They had to drop by LME to change to a limousine and the extra travel-time was costing them dearly. 

Finally, he couldn’t leave it any longer and turned off the water. He quickly shaved, wrapped a towel around himself and left the bathroom. He crossed the bedroom and knocked on the closet door, just in case Kyoko was still getting changed. There was no reply so he pushed the door open. 

It was at times like this that Ren was glad to be a man. He towel dried his hair with one hand as he pulled out the clothes he was contractually obliged to wear. He was dressed in three minutes. He combed his hair in five quick swipes, dabbed some product into his palm and then messed it up again into that ‘casually gorgeous’ style he’d taken to setting it in since he’d woken up with this new, shorter haircut. 

He was also glad he’d come out as Hizuri Kuon to the public already. It meant he could forgo the uncomfortable practice of putting in his brown contacts. 

Five minutes after he stepped out of the bathroom, Ren was stepping into the living room, completely ready to go.

Nao gave him a glance over and, finding no fault with his appearance, gave him a passing grade. Kyoko was sitting on the couch, trying to pull the ruffles of her skirt together to cover a little bit more of her legs. She turned to face him when she heard Ren’s footsteps coming and he froze. 

Once again, she didn’t look like herself. She’d transformed into someone else. Smokey eyes. Deep, burgundy lips. Her eyes looked like embers amongst the smoke. She looked older. No, that’s not right. She looked more  _ mature _ . Like the twenty-six year old woman she was. 

She stood to greet him and her dress fell into place. 

Ren felt his mouth go dry. Her legs. It was like the ruffles of the dress were framing them. ‘Have a look at these works of art,’ they screamed. It should be illegal for her to leave the house dressed like that. 

Of course, wearing that dress  _ in  _ the house was totally fine. 

“It looks strange, doesn’t it?” said Kyoko, noticing him staring and tugging the ruffles closed again. 

Her voice shook Ren out of his mildly inappropriate thoughts. 

“ _ Holy shit… _ ” He swore in English. They were the only words he could think of to say. 

“I knew it,” said Kyoko, suddenly panicked. “It doesn’t suit me! Akechi-san, isn’t there anything else I can wear? Does it really have to be this dress?”

Nao looked at Ren’s frozen expression and just smiled. She muttered something about checking on the car and left the room. Kyoko’s hands reached after her as if she could pull her back. But, in reality, she’d never be able to walk fast enough in the towering heels Dia-MONDE had sent her to catch up to her manager. The only option she had left was to turn back to Tsuruga-san, who was still standing there with his mouth open.

“Tsuruga-san?” she said.

“You look beautiful,” he whispered, his thoughts still not entirely coherent. 

Kyoko blushed but stopped tugging on the ruffles. 

Ren was slowly gravitating towards her, wandering and ghost-like and Kyoko had to wonder whether he actually knew he was walking at all. 

“Amazing,” he said, gazing at her from up close. “Do you mind?” He gestured with his hands towards her waist.

Kyoko felt like all the foundation in the world couldn’t cover the redness of her face. She shook her head. She didn’t mind at all. 

Ren let his hands slip around her. The material was so thin, it felt like her skin had turned to actual silk. She was warm and smooth, he could feel her pulse directly beneath the fabric. She felt amazing against his palms. His fingers trailed up her sides, over her ribs and then onto her back. He gasped when he felt the material end and her bare skin begin. 

Kyoko couldn’t help a chuckle at his reaction. 

Ren rolled his eyes at her with a smile. Yes, he was childish sometimes. She would just have to get used to it. 

He slid his hands down her back again, aiming to rest them back on her waist, but something stopped him. The smoothness gave way to something hard and lumpy under her skin. 

“What? What is it?” said Kyoko, worried by his sudden change in expression. 

Ren turned her a little so he could see what he was feeling. 

A thick, white scar, the deepest points of it still glaringly purple, sat beside her spine as if it had every right to be there. 

“Kyoko, what on earth happened? How did you get this scar?”

Kyoko gave a gasp of realisation. The titanium pins. The surgery scar. She hadn’t told him anything yet. They’d both been too busy. 

Akechi-san had offered to cover the scar with makeup but Kyoko said no. Who cared if it was ‘unsightly’? Unsightly for whom? If they didn’t like it, they could just look away. That scar was the evidence of all the hard work people had gone through in order to let her walk again. 

She should have told Tsuruga-san, though. He’d been in the crash, too. He probably had scars as well. Scars on his own body that he didn’t know about. Still, it was better he noticed it here than when they got to the premiere. 

“That night,” she started, “that night we both remember -- when you were taking me home from TBM? I found out last week that we never made it home. A truck ran a red light and crashed into us.”

Ren’s mouth fell open again. He’d been literally hit by a truck and he didn’t remember it. Kyoko had some deep-tissue scar on her back and he didn’t remember it.

“The scar’s from surgery,” she went on. “I fractured two of my vertebrae, one of them pretty badly, and they had to operate. They put some pins in to hold everything where it should be. Tsuruga-san,” she looked up at him then, tears building at the corners of her eyes. She didn’t let them fall, though. Akechi-san had worked for too long to get her makeup done, she wasn’t going to cry it all off. “Tsuruga-san, I was almost a paraplegic. I almost lost the ability to walk. I…” The words ran out. 

Ren didn’t reply. He just wrapped her in his arms and held her tightly. She was alive and that’s all he cared about.

She felt selfish. Here she was, worrying about her stupid T12 vertebra again when Tsuruga-san had been in that crash too. He’d fallen into a coma, too. But she hadn’t even mentioned it. Didn’t he have a right to know?

She didn’t say anything, though. She just enjoyed the warm feeling of being held and the steady beat of his heart under her ear and allowed the guilt to fester.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this is a day late. I'm not feeling too great at the moment. Also, I can't guarantee that next week's chapter will be on time. I'm house sitting for my sister for a week and a half while she's in New Zealand and, since my laptop is *still* not fixed... that means the only internet I'll have during that time will be my phone. So I can still reply to comments, it's just that posting new content will be hard. But, it's not like I'll be out of the country (or even out of the city) so I could drive across town to come post something for you. Who knows. We'll see how I'm feeling at the time.
> 
> Now! This chapter! There's some sort-of angst in here. I don't think this is the only angst in this fic but I think we might finally be at the end of Kyoko freaking out about almost being paralysed. Also there's some awkward new-relationship stuff and some setting up for the third arc and some more Cross the Floor. What do you think?  
> By the way, I think I've worked out why I'm so stuck on this fic at the moment. I've made them too busy to have time for the plot. Like, the bit I'm up to, I'm trying to transition into the third arc while Kyoko is still promoting The Threads that Connect Us, plus that other movie she went to that press conference for back in chapter 4, plus filming for Cross the Floor (whose first episode is coming out in about a week so she should really be promoting that as well), plus a press tour... Meanwhile, I'm trying to introduce Ren's new drama and work out how he could ----- (spoilers blanked out). It's like I've worked myself into a corner. You remember back in chapter 10 when Ren was trying to act that complex Ushio scene and he was like, 'I can do all the emotions separately but I can't do them together'? It's like that. It's exhausting to write.   
> But I'll keep going! I really want to scrap the last few chapters I've written and start again but I'll keep going! I've gotten too far on this thing to give up now.
> 
> Anyway, I should go. This chapter's already late enough without me blabbering on here. I hope you enjoyed the chapter! I hope you enjoyed Kyoko's dress. And I hope to see you all next week (or whenever I can actually post that chapter),
> 
> Ocean.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, hello again, friends. It's not actually Sunday anymore where I live but I've made you wait... a fortnight? Three weeks? Something like that, already so I figured I'd just post this.

_ Don’t start wiping at that spot on your screen, it’s not dust. That’s a scar on film and television actress, Kyoko’s back.  _

_ Kyoko-san stole the show at the premiere of  _ The Threads that Connect Us _ last night with her shockingly backless dress. The dress is a pre-release from start-up designer brand,  _ Dia-MONDE _ and Kyoko-san wore it with five inch silver heels, also from  _ Dia-MONDE _ , and a beautiful, white gold, long necklace from  _ Finesse _. She told us that, while she had been apprehensive when she first saw the dress, she just had to have it as soon as she saw what it looked like on.  _

_ The scar is from spinal surgery following a severe traffic accident nine years ago. This was the same crash that first alerted this publication to the possibility of a romance between Kyoko-san and her now husband, Hizuri Kuon -- better known to most of us as star actor and model, Tsuruga Ren. Kyoko-san was a role model for positive body image when we asked her about the rather obvious blemish on her skin. “I’m incredibly grateful for this scar,” said Kyoko-san. “It is the representation of all the hard work I and a lot of other people have gone through to let me walk again. Some people have told me it’s ugly but I thought, ‘who cares?’ This scar is my history. It’s part of who I am.” _

_ She was joined, of course, by her husband, the hottest arm-candy of the night. Tsuruga-san is best known for playing such roles as Ichinose Hisato in the hit detective drama,  _ Gone for Good _ , and Katsuki from the drama that still holds the record for highest television viewership,  _ Dark Moon _. When asked what his highlight of the night had been so far, he simply gestured towards his wife and said, “Isn’t she gorgeous?” _

_ We have to agree.  _

 

***

 

If Kyoko had thought she was tired before the premiere, it was nothing compared to how she felt the day after. 

With interviews, the actual screening and then the after party, Kyoko hadn’t gotten home until after midnight. And then she had to get up at six-thirty the next day in order to make it to the start of more interviews by eight. She was glad, at least, to not be a journalist rostered to the first press-screening of the day. That started at six. From there, she’d spent practically the whole day saying the same things over and over again. 

There were two and a half hours of panel interviews, then a two hour long signing event, followed by another five and a half hours of press junkets where, either in small groups or alone, she was passed from one interviewer to another until she was nothing more than a withered husk. 

Most of the questions were the same and Kyoko felt herself developing a set of carefully polished answers to deal with them. 

_ ‘Describe the movie in five words or less.’ _

Six degrees of separation.

_ ‘So, talk to us about your character.’ _

Nanami is this incredibly prideful yet deeply unhappy person who feels like she’s swimming against the current. She’s the older sister of Chie, the main character, and she’s always comparing herself to her. It’s this strange conflict of emotions. She thinks she’s is capable of being better than Chie but can never quite live up to her own expectations. 

She’s just finished college with a major in foreign languages but she can’t find a full time job. She doesn’t even have time to look for one because she’s working two part time jobs in order to afford her rent so that she won’t have to move back in with her parents -- something she would see as a failure. Meanwhile, she’s also trying to help her best friend, played by Momose-san -- Momose Itsumi-san -- who’s just had a bad break up. It eventually gets to the point where all the pressures fall in on her and she has to re-think her priorities.

_ ‘What do you think the take-home message of the movie would be?’ _

We might think we’re all alone in the world but, really, everyone’s connected.

_ ‘This movie has a lot of characters, each with their own plots. If you had to play a character other than your own, who would it be?’ _

I would love to play Koji, Sasaki-san’s character, even though he’s a boy. Just because he’s so fearless while still being so fragile.

_ ‘What was your favourite scene to film?’ _

Ah, that would have to be the last scene where Nanami -- actually, I won’t tell you. You’ll just have to watch the movie!

_ ‘What was your least favourite scene to film?’ _

Oh, definitely the scene where my character and Momose-san’s character fight. It was really emotionally exhausting to create that rift between us, it was like I was fighting with my real life friends.

_ ‘And what was it like working with Momose Itsumi for the first time since  _ Dark Moon _?’ _

Great! Of course it was great. Momose-san is always so friendly and kind which makes it a little less daunting to talk to her when you know she’s also this staunchly professional, amazing actress.

 

The problem came when the interviewer asked something completely random for the sake of being original. Like, ‘what did you have for lunch most days?’ 

When questions like that came up, Kyoko could only give some vague answer like, ‘oh, lots of things,’ or, if she was lucky, there’d be some other cast member there for her to throw the question to.

It got to the point where, while Kyoko still had absolutely no memory of filming the movie, it felt like she did. She’d relived the entire filming process in anecdotes from the cast and questions from the public. She was glad that backstage hijinks didn’t come up as a question as often as she thought it would.  _ Threads  _ didn’t have the reputation of being a fun set, for which she was infinitely grateful. 

 

***

 

Kyoko stared at the coffee and the bottle of water that sat on the desk in front of her for a moment before she slapped her cheeks twice and set her face in a determined smile. 

She was happy. She was fine. She hadn’t just spent the last twelve hours doing one sort of interview or another. 

She looked up, game face on, just as a security guard opened the door and the first of the fans started pouring through. She just had to think of this as a role. She wasn’t Kyoko the exhausted girl, she was ‘Kyoko’ the talented young actress who adored her fans and had a shining future ahead of her. 

“Are you okay, Kyoko-san?” whispered Momose Itsumi from the seat beside her. She’d been startled a little by the sudden slaps and couldn’t just sit there while Kyoko’s cheeks got redder and redder in the aftermath.

Kyoko gave her a blindingly happy smile, already in character. “Of course, Momose-san,” she said. “Why wouldn’t I be fine?”

“It’s just that --” started Itsumi but, just then, the first fan arrived at the long table and the signing event began.

The line coiled across the function-room floor like a serpent, folding back on itself again and again to fit as many people inside the room as possible. Even then, it still continued out the door for a little way. This was the evening signing event, it wasn’t as long as the morning one, and Kyoko doubted they would manage to get through everyone before their allotted hour and a half were up. Most of them hadn’t even seen the movie, yet. They’d just heard that so-and-so were doing an autograph session as part of the promotion and had hurried on down for the chance to meet their favourite celebrities. 

Kyoko shook hands and smiled, took selfies with fans and made small talk quite happily, her exhaustion pushed aside by her character for the moment. Except, there was still a little part of her brain that didn’t want to be there. It was the part that usually reminded her how much she loved acting. 

That felt rude. She was being supported by these people. They were what kept her career afloat in a business where popularity was everything. But she couldn’t help thinking that she wasn’t acting for them. She was acting because she just wanted to act. 

Maybe that’s what the president had been talking about when he put her in the LoveMe division. Entertainers needed the ability to love their audience in order to be appealing. Any that couldn’t, wouldn’t last long in show-biz.

So, Kyoko made another attempt to truly enjoy herself. To feel more than flattered when people told her they were her fans, to hear something other than lip-service in their words. She wanted to believe they were genuine compliments but that was easier said than done. It was so much easier to distrust everything.

Two girls in very short skirts and very tight tops with their midriffs showing were making their way along the panel. They shook hands and smiled and held out the movie poster they’d bought together for the cast to sign. One of them even asked the main hero of the story to sign her phone case -- but he was the only one who was asked for something special. 

Until they got to Kyoko. 

They waved and screamed when they were still three cast members down the table from her. 

“Kyoko-tan!” 

Kyoko felt a little uncomfortable by them addressing her with ‘-tan’. They couldn’t be older than fifteen and, though she didn’t remember it, she was more than ten years their senior. Still, that was the price of fame, she supposed. People called you whatever they liked in the comfort of their lounge rooms and you had to just deal with it if they called you the way they were most used to when they saw you in person. 

So Kyoko smiled and waved before she turned back to the part of the line that was actually in front of her right then. She was signing something -- a chemistry textbook? -- for a teenage boy as he squinted at her with his brow furrowed. Maybe it was the only paper he had to hand.

“Was that really you in  _ Try, Try Again _ ?” he asked finally, his voice still holding all the squeakiness of adolescence.

Kyoko put on a professional smile while she thought as quickly as she could. Was it her? She wasn’t sure. Which one was  _ Try, Try Again _ , again? Was it the one with the woman who kept marrying rich old men in the hopes that they would die off and leave her a fortune? Or was it the one with the man whose company went bankrupt and he had to build it up again from scratch?

No! She had it! It was the one about a second chance at life. Where a man is offered the chance to re-live the last week of his life. She  _ was  _ in that. She’d played the love interest. 

“It sure was,” she said at last. 

Luckily the boy didn’t notice her long pause.

“You look completely different,” he said, a little disappointed. He’d probably been looking forward to meeting the unintentionally sexy waitress she’d played in his favourite drama. 

“That’s just the magic of makeup, I’m afraid,” she said and the boy moved on down the line. 

Meanwhile, the girls in midriff tops had reached Kyoko and were practically pushing the boy out of the way. 

“Oh my God, it’s Kyoko-tan!” said one of them, the one with bleached blonde hair. 

Kyoko just smiled. 

“I’ve been watching you on the tellie since, like, forever,” she went on.

“Oh my God, yeah!” said the other, this one with a blue stripe dyed into her hair. “Like, sneaking downstairs to watch  _ Dark Moon  _ from behind the sofa so Mum and Dad didn’t find out.”

“‘cause, like,” started the blonde one, “‘no one can see you if you hide behind a sofa!’” They both finished together and then laughed. 

Kyoko didn’t know what to say so she just kept smiling, murmuring her thanks for their support. 

“But, urgh,” said the one with the blue stripe, finally turning back to Kyoko, “my mum and dad were so dumb. They, like, said I couldn’t watch it because I was too young, or whatever, but… you know! If you don’t know what violence is by the time you’re seven, then you never will, right?”

“I’d think seven might still be a bit young for some of the things in  _ Dark Moon _ ,” said Kyoko, “but I’m grateful you did sneak down, all the same. If not, I might not get to meet you here today.”

“I know right!” said Blue Stripe. 

“Hey, Kyoko-tan,” said Blondie, “is Kuon-kun coming to pick you up from this thing, or something, later?”

Kyoko felt her eye twitch at ‘Kuon-kun’. It was one thing when they did it to her but when Tsuruga-san was addressed so disrespectfully, it was almost more than she could take. 

_ Let me at her! _ her heart cried.  _ I’ll teach her how the Japanese social hierarchy works! _

She hushed it and tried to pick up her train of thought again.

There was something deeply unsettling about the way the girl had used his real name. It was like she didn’t like him because of his acting. But she didn’t know anything about the man behind the act. So, what? Did she just like him for his face? Somehow, that was incredibly sad when there was so much more to him beyond that. 

“No, he’s working today,” she said at last.

“Oh, bummer!” said Blue Stripe. 

“Yeah, I thought I’d get to meet my favourite actress of all time  _ and  _ my favourite actor of all time in one day!”

“Not to mention he’s freaking  _ hot _ !” 

They both laughed. 

Kyoko wanted to tell them to forget it. He was twice their age and already married. And, apparently, the marriage wasn't entirely against his will, either. It wasn’t worth it to subject their young hearts to such a doomed love. 

Instead she just plastered her slipping smile back into position and said, “I’m sorry to dash your hopes, then.”

“You’re so lucky to be married to him!” said Blondie. 

“Imagine living with Kuon-kun!” said Blue Stripe. “It’d be like a twenty-four hour, nosebleed-worthy perv-a-thon!”

The two finally noticed the backlog that was building up behind them and moved on with nothing more than a “We love you, Kyoko-tan!” shouted in her direction.

Kyoko tried not to let her sigh show too obviously before she moved onto the next person in line.

  
  


***

 

Unlike Natsu had hoped, Koyama did tell someone that Kyoko had been to the hospital and what she had been there for. He told Emi. In a rare moment of peace between them, an uncomfortable silence fell and, desperate to break the tension, Koyama let slip the little tidbit of gossip that he knew. 

It was harmless. It was supposed to be harmless. 

But Emi worked for the same publishing house that Koyama did. Except, where he worked with a literary magazine that published essays and short stories, she worked in the online division -- in celebrity news. 

Emi didn’t write the story herself. She just mentioned it in passing to a co-worker who then told another co-worker who then told their boss who gave the story to someone else. That someone else wrote the story. 

_ Hizuri Kyoko, Brain Cancer? _ was the headline.

So, while Kyoko was stuck in her second signing event of the day, someone completely unrelated to her trip to Aoki-sensei sat down and wrote an article.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I read so many so many trashy celebrity news articles researching for this, it's not even funny. I can't remember who it was about but one of them was literally just, 'woman wears a coat to buy coffee' and I just... like, why is this news?!  
> Gone for Good is actually the name of a song by The Shins. There's no deep meaning behind naming Ren's drama this. It just happened to be what popped into my head first. At the time that I wrote this chapter, I was only ever planning to mention it in passing and, while I did go on to extrapolate a little on the show in later chapters, the name remains mostly random.  
> Remember when I mentioned in an earlier AN about watching so many press junkets as research they'd all melted into one big mess in my brain? Well... tadaa!  
> The 'no one can see you if you hide behind the sofa!' line is paraphrased from an interview with Neil Gaiman on the Craig Ferguson's The Late Late Show (they're talking about watching Dr. Who as children). I watched it when I had to write a book review for Gaiman's book Neverwhere (conclusion: really fun to read but not brilliantly original) for a genre fiction class and was really stuck with ideas.
> 
> Phew, we're finally well and truly into the second arc. I hope you're all okay with the direction this is taking. I also want to thank you for sticking around while I was MIA. Some stuff happened and then some other stuff happened -- none of it really prevented me from writing but it's always good to have some excuse. I am sorry, though.   
> Also! My laptop is back!!! At last! Finally!   
> But........ I have to go back to uni soon... like, in maybe less than three weeks soon (I should really know exactly but it's so much easier to pretend it's not happening) so, while I still have a few more chapters written, I'm not exactly sure what's going to happen once I run out of them. I am still very stuck with this at the moment and I don't think going back to full time study is really going to help with that. 
> 
> Okay! But! I will be back again next week. We should be back on a weekly Sunday update schedule at least for a little while. I really hope you enjoyed this chapter! Let me know if you did (or if you didn't) so I can have some clue what I'm doing.   
> Until next week,  
> Ocean.


	15. Chapter 15

_ Kyoko, star of the new film  _ The Threads That Connect Us _ , due for public release on Tuesday, could only have months to live. Kyoko-san, seen above at Friday’s premiere with husband, Hizuri Kuon, was spotted leaving the Yamase General Hospital last Sunday. Witnesses say she looked uncomfortable and agitated before she entered and dazed and confused when she left again. “I was so surprised,” said one witness. “I never expected to see [Kyoko-san] there! She always seems so vibrant and healthy.” _

_ Recently there have been plenty of baby rumours floating around the stellar couple but could Kyoko-san’s trips to the hospital be for a less happy reason? One source, who works at the hospital, told  _ StarTracker.com  _ that the actress was there for “brain scans”, specifically CAT scans. “There’s aren’t really a lot of reasons why people go in for that sort of scan,” said the source. “…  most people are there because they’re about to go into surgery, they’ve had a stroke recently or they have some sort of tumour… in their brain.” _

StarTracker  _ can confirm that, according to our source, Kyoko-san has not booked any surgery following her scan and she has not had a stroke, leaving the only conclusion to be that Hizuri Kyoko has a tumour growing in her brain. How malignant this tumour is, we can’t be sure, but it could mean that the talented television and film actress’ days are numbered. _

 

***

 

“I don’t have brain cancer,” said Kyoko, putting Akechi-san’s phone, on which she had been reading the article, down on the coffee table. 

“You do now,” said Yashiro, crossing his arms.

Nao frowned at him “What Yashiro-kun means to say is that it’s  _ like  _ you have brain cancer because that’s what the public thinks is the truth.”

“But I don’t! I’m perfectly fine, physically. The scans said I was fine.”

“Yes, but, that’s not what it looks like from the outside,” said Yashiro. 

“Can’t we just ignore it? Rumours are a part of the business,” said Kyoko, remembering what Moko-san had said the week before. “It’ll just run its course and then the media will move onto something else.”

“Yes,” said Nao, “the media will. But how many studios will hire you for long term projects when they think you might fall off the perch at any moment? How safe is your role as Kihara Kanon if Director Tono thinks you might die before the first episode airs?”

Kyoko opened her mouth to rebut but couldn’t think of anything to say. So she turned to her mentor and sempai hopefully.

“Tsuruga-san?” she said. Maybe he had some magic way to make this all disappear. 

Ren hadn’t said anything since the impromptu meeting began. He’d just sat deep in the couch with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. 

Of all the things to happen while they were stuck in this stupid state of amnesia. Now the hospital had been all but barred to them. There would be reporters everywhere; in the bushes outside, disguised as patients inside, boldly milling around the entrance with their cameras and their tablet computers. How were they supposed to recover their memories if medical assistance had been cut off?

Or maybe they weren’t supposed to remember. Maybe fate had designed it so they would both lose nine years of their lives here and never ever get them back again. A sudden wave of loneliness washed over Ren at the thought. 

He’d had his own scans the evening before, while Kyoko had been stuck in that signing event, in the hope that his brain might shed some light on what had happened to them. Nothing. He’d apparently suffered a greater head injury because Aoki-sensei had found some minor scarring and been so excited he made one sentence run on for almost three full minutes. But it was nothing that could explain his memory loss. Chronic headaches at worst. Kyoko was due to go back to Aoki-sensei the next Saturday to do more scans with the contrast agent but that probably wouldn’t happen anymore. 

If this couldn’t be sorted out, they could both say goodbye to their memories for good. 

“Tsuruga-san?” said Kyoko again after he didn’t respond. 

Ren’s head snapped up and looked around the room. “Sorry, what was the question?” he said.

“What do you think I should do?” said Kyoko.

Ren let out a long sigh. There wasn’t a lot she could do, save release the scans -- and that would be the last resort. 

“I think you’re right. We should just ignore it. We don’t want to make this into something bigger than it already is,” he said aloud.

“But we can’t ignore it completely,” said Nao. “This concerns her ability to do her job. Or, at least, people’s perception of her ability to do her job.”

“No, we can’t ignore it  _ completely _ ,” said Ren, “but we can laugh it off. Not mention it until asked and, when it is, just say it’s ridiculous and a load of nonsense.”

“But I did go for the scans,” said Kyoko. “They’ll probably find some way to prove that and, if they do, it will look like I was lying about everything. It will practically confirm that I’m dying.”

“I’m going to go talk to the president,” said Nao. “Maybe there’s some other way of dealing with this. Until we have a solid solution, we must be seen to carry on as normal. We don’t shift anything in our schedules until we know how we’re going to deal with this. Kyoko-chan, if I’m not mistaken, you have an interview at noon today. When they ask, and I’m almost 100% certain that they will ask, feign ignorance. If you can’t do that, say it’s private matter and you’d rather not talk about it. Make sure you emphasise that you’re entirely healthy, though. We don’t want people getting the wrong idea. Kuon-san, are you working today?”

Ren just looked at Yashiro who flipped open a schedule book -- a paper one in order to avoid any unfortunate accidents at the hands of his mysterious powers. 

“You’ve got a call back from that audition you took last Tuesday at ten and filming for  _ Here's My Number  _ at four today,” he said. 

“What was that second thing?” asked Nao, confused.

“It’s a romantic/comedy drama that Ren’s making a guest appearance in as himself,” said Yashiro.

Nao wrinkled her nose in distaste. She’d never really liked shows that pulled that stunt. It was obvious fan baiting and she preferred actual content when she watched TV. 

“Well,” she said, “it might not come up but, if it does --”

“Make something up?” said Ren with a smile. 

“Exactly,” said Nao.

***

 

_ hunkybookmark _ \-- real name, Kishi Ayano -- finally finished fixing up her set and sat down at her computer. The ‘set’ was really just her living room. She positioned her state-of-the-art webcam in the direction that made it look as stylish and fashionable as possible, shoved all the mess out of frame, and sat down at her dining table.

Ayano was a professional youtuber. It wasn’t exactly the best paying job most of the time and it required constant upkeep but it was what she loved doing. She ran a successful channel that had started out as a reviewer of novels and only novels. She'd learnt pretty quickly, though, that it was the audience that drove her content and nowadays her book reviews were few and far between. Now she reviewed movies and games and dramas, as well. Really, she’d review anything at this point as long as enough people wanted her to do it. In recent years, as her notoriety grew, she’d even been lucky enough to interview some of the people involved in those movies, television shows, games and books. In fact, she probably did more of that now than plain reviews. She covered conventions and created audiobooks of particularly popular fanfics. Recently, a friend had asked to illustrate for the audiobooks and now the illustrated videos were outperforming the not-illustrated ones with ten views to one. 

And, that afternoon, she got to talk to Kyoko-san -- actress and inspiration to a new wave of TV talents. 

She pulled her list of questions in front of her again. She’d written them out by hand just incase something went wrong with the device she’d stored them on and she lost them in the middle of the interview. Ayano mouthed along with the words as she quickly read through them all again, checking to see if they flowed well, if they were worded strangely, if they were original enough to make people keep coming back to her channel. 

She closed all the tabs she’d had open, filled with as many interviews with the star as she could find -- including some that Kyoko had done only the day before in her marathon interview session -- and did one last, quick google search to make sure she was up to date on everything. 

That was when she found the article. 

It had spread by then. It wasn’t just on startracker.com. It was everywhere, like a virus.

Kyoko-san had cancer. Kyoko-san had an actual tumour in her brain. She might die -- no, she was  _ dying. _ It was inevitable. According to all those articles, it was inoperable. It was just a matter of time before the tumour metasised into her bloodstream or lymphatic system and spread throughout her body. 

Maybe she wouldn’t make it to the interview. She was probably too upset over having this leaked to the world. Ayano knew that, if she was in Kyoko-san’s place, she wouldn’t want to be having some frivolous interview with a youtube wannabe when the entire world had just been informed, without her consent, that she was going to die.

Just as she was thinking this, a skype call came in.

She quickly alt-tabbed her way over to the window. Kyoko-san was calling. She was coming to the interview after all. 

Ayano felt strangely unprofessional knowing that she hadn’t been the one to call. Still, she hit ‘receive’ all the same and one giant, golden eye filled the screen.

“Ah!” she cried, jumping back.

The eye withdrew. “Oh, I’m sorry,” said Kyoko-san. “It didn’t look like it was working so I thought, maybe, I’d done something wrong and went to have a closer look.”

“It’s fine,” said Ayano. “I was just a little surprised.”

Kyoko smiled. “Good afternoon, Hunkybookmark-san,” she said, bowing her head. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“Good afternoon, Kyoko-san. You, too,” said Ayano. She looked down at her notes and swallowed dryly. “Ah, thank you so much for doing this, by the way. I’m sure you’re really busy.”

“It’s fine!” replied Kyoko. “I’m glad to be here. I had the whole morning off, anyway.”

_ To recover from that article _ , thought Ayano.

“That’s good,” she replied out loud. “Do you have any questions or anything about how this works?”

“It doesn’t work like an ordinary interview?”

“Well, it’s mostly the same but we’ll be livestreaming so people can tweet in questions and things.”

“How modern,” said Kyoko.

Ayano raised an eyebrow. It wasn’t really that modern. The technology had probably been around for about twenty years or so. But she didn’t say that. 

“Anything else you were wondering about? Concerns? Questions? Anything like that?” Ayano said instead. 

Kyoko shook her head.

“Well, let’s get down to it, then,” said Ayano. “Just give me thirty seconds to set it up and then we’ll be rolling.”

She clicked a few things, started the screen capture recording, turned on the livestream on her channel and opened twitter on her phone. She sent a quick tweet to let people know they were live and which hashtag to use if they wanted to ask a question, and then she turned back to Kyoko-san with a TV smile.

“Hey guys, Hunkybookmark here. Welcome back to those of you who’ve seen me before and nice to meet you to those who haven’t. Today I have the incredible privilege of sitting down with the one and only Kyoko-san, star of  _ Concrete Jungle, My House is Yours, Ten Men, Ten Colours _ and, so,  _ so _ many others. Not to mention she has a movie coming out soon. Like, really soon. On Tuesday! So go see it. The film’s called  _ The Threads That Connect Us _ . I pulled every contact I know ahead of the release date and managed to get into one of the press screenings yesterday. It’s amazing.

“So, welcome, Kyoko-san.”

Kyoko bowed in her chair. “It’s nice to be here,” she said. 

“Let’s jump right into it, then, and talk about this new movie. What’s it about? Who’s in it? And why should we go see it?”

“The movie is about a highschool girl named Chie, played by Sakurai Tsubaki, and all the people that come into and out of her life. There are a quite a lot of characters and a few different story lines but they all weave in and out of Chie’s story. That story is about a girl who’s struggling through her last year of high school, trying to balance study, her part time job and her friends, all while she tries to get the guy. I play Chie’s older sister, Nanami, who is being squashed by the difference between who she is and who she wants to be. Nanami’s story is linked with Momose Itsumi’s character, Kako, who is her best friend, and a character called Koji who is played by Sasaki Yuu. Koji is the cram school teacher of one of Chie’s best friends and also the boyfriend of another character. Nanami meets him at her part time job, they eventually become friends, and he helps her with her problems.”

“That sounds incredibly complicated,” said Ayano. 

“It does because I’m trying not to give away too much of the story. And that’s not even all the characters.  _ Threads  _ also has Kajitani Hiroto, Sugihara Yuriko and Takemura Sayuri in it and they all do a amazing jobs. So, if you’re a fan of any of their work, you should get your hands on a ticket. I’m sorry, I’m making this sound really confusing but, trust me, in the movie, all the stories flow in and out of each other very smoothly.”

Ayano looked straight down her webcam’s lens. “That’s actually true. The movie does roll really smoothly but I’m only just realising how impossible it is to make it sound simple when you explain it with words.” She looked back at Kyoko-san. “Go on, Kyoko-san. You were telling us why we should go see it.”

“Because it’s a story about family,” said Kyoko, “and a story about friends, a story about love and finding out where you belong -- even if it isn’t a very nice place to be. I don’t want to give too much away but one of the characters doesn’t live happily ever after. And that’s okay. Because that's the way life is sometimes and you just have to pull your socks up and get on with it.”

Ayano didn’t want to think that this was being said by a woman dying of brain cancer. It made the words ‘pull your socks up and get on with it’ sound far more inspirational than they would otherwise. 

“Wow, so: a star studded cast with a story that will pull on your heartstrings. Relationships and drama abound!” Ayano gripped her slipping professionalism and pulled it back into place.

“That’s about it,” said Kyoko.

“Next question,” said Ayano, checking twitter. “This one comes from @mioisqueen524. They want to know: ‘Kyoko-3, you’re successful now but how did you get into your career in the first place?’”

Kyoko cocked an eyebrow and stared up at the ceiling as if asking for divine assistance. “Well, is it how I got into acting or how I got into show biz? Because those are two completely different questions,” she said at last.

“Let’s go with ‘both’,” Ayano replied with a wicked grin. 

Kyoko sighed. She was sure she’d been asked this question before. She’d probably been asked it a thousand times in that massive blank in her memory. But that didn’t make it any less embarrassing. And this felt like the very first time. Mogami Kyoko was hardly famous enough for this question.

She just really hoped her answer wouldn't misalign too drastically with those she'd given before. 

“Okay,” she said with another sigh. “Let’s start with acting, though, because that one’s less embarrassing.”

Ayano nodded. 

“Well, back when I was still just a helper at LME, someone who ran around doing odd-jobs, I was assigned to help Matsunai Ruriko-san during the filming of her first acting job. Do you know it? It was a movie called Ring-Doh.”

Ayano thought about it for a moment before she shook her head. “No, I can’t say I’ve seen that one. I’m sure one of our viewers has, though. If you’re watching, have seen Ring-Doh, and would like to give us a summary of the movie in 140 characters or less, feel free to tweet it either at me, @hunkybookmark, or with the hashtag, #ChattingWithK, or both.”

Kyoko blinked at the strange speil of nonsense that had just come out of her interviewer’s mouth but decided to just shake her head and get on with the story. 

“Well, the filming was going along all well and good but…” Kyoko paused. She didn’t want to tell them what really happened, that would hurt Ruriko-chan’s reputation. And it was a bit pointless so long after the fact. “Some things happened,” she eventually settled on, “and I somehow ended up shooting a few of the scenes.”

“You were in the movie?”

“No, no, the footage was never used. I don’t really remember, it was so long ago, but I think it was just a lighting test or something while Ruriko-chan was elsewhere. But, for those who have seen the movie, the scene that particularly inspired me to act was the tea ceremony scene with Tsuruga Ren.”

“Oh!” said Ayano with a gasp of understanding. “So this was a movie with Tsuruga-san in it?”

“Yes, he played the hero. But, the thing is, that during this scene, I completely forgot I was acting. Ren-san’s acting drew out such on-point, perfectly in character responses from me without any conscious effort on my part. When I rewatched the footage, I got chills down my spine. He was amazingly good.”

“And that’s when you fell in love with him,” finished Ayano but Kyoko shook her head.

“No, that’s when I vowed to defeat him. I was going to raise my acting skills until he could never manipulate me like that again.”

Ayano laughed and her phone vibrated in rapid succession as a wave of response tweets came in. 

Most of them were things like: ‘ **ohmigod, lol. So much for love at first sight. #chattingwithk #hizurikyoko #kyoko &kuon4eva @hunkybookmark** ’ and Ayano ignored them. 

“Okay,” she said, still trying to reign in her laughter, “so that’s what set you on the path of acting but what were you trying to be in show-biz before then?”

“Honestly?” she said.

“Honestly,” said Ayano.

“It really didn’t matter. I just wanted to be there. A lot of people got angry at me for that sort of thinking. I get angry at the old me for that sort thinking. What was I doing, trying to be an entertainer without any sort of goal in mind? Needless to say, I didn’t get anywhere until I found something I loved, buckled down and worked hard for a clear goal.”

Ayano shook her head. That was mad. Of course she’d gotten nowhere with such lukewarm feelings. This was show biz, not a high school talent show.

“But you must have been there for a reason,” she said. “Something that made you wake up one day and think, ‘I want to be famous’.”

Kyoko froze. Her face drained of colour and then it flooded back in with a bright, angry red. Ayano thought she could actually see fires burning in her eyes. Whatever Kyoko-san was remembering, it was making her burn with fury from her very core. 

“Yes,” Kyoko hissed. “Yes, there was a reason, wasn’t there?”

“And it was?”

Kyoko opened her mouth to spew out whatever hate-filled bile was rising up through her throat when there was suddenly a clatter on her end of the call. All the anger immediately evaporated off her face like it had never been there to begin with. 

Kyoko-san’s head turned to the left, towards the sound, and cocked to the side for a second.

A voice. Quiet and muffled by the door and all the soundproofing in the study walls, barely making it through the microphone and across the internet into Ayano’s headphones. 

“I’m home,” said the voice. “Hello? Kyoko? Babe?”

Ayano watched as Kyoko looked startled at the word ‘babe’ and wondered why she did. 

Kyoko thought for a moment before she called out, “In the study!” and then turned back to the camera. “One second, please,” she said, holding a finger up to the camera to reiterate her point. 

Then she pushed out of her chair so hard and fast, it skidded backwards and out of frame.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *sigh* man I really hate writing interviews. They're so awkward and clunky.... Hopefully this is still okay.
> 
> There's another subtle North and South reference in this chapter. I doubt anyone will spot it but feel free to look if you'd like ;)
> 
> There's not actually a lot to say this chap. I mean, I'm still stuck with this so I could always complain a bit but... yeah, you don't want to hear anymore of that. I could tell you that next weekend is supposed to be so hot where I live that my family is running away to the snow (or, at least, where there would be snow if it weren't the middle of summer). I'm staying home, though. It's one of my best friends' 21st birthdays and I already promised to do something with her. So, basically, what I'm saying is: I'll still be here to give you a new chapter next week :)
> 
> That's about it. I'm gonna go. Thanks as always for reading. Don't forget to hit that kudos button if you liked it or leave a comment to let me know how I'm going. Thanks again. Until next week,  
> Ocean.


	16. Chapter 16

Ren sat nervously fidgeting in the cafeteria of LME. It wasn’t often that he got four straight hours free between commitments in the middle of the day. He knew he should be thinking about the audition call-back he had almost certainly just flunked but he couldn’t. He couldn’t for the same reason he’d flunked the audition. His brain was too focused on Kyoko. 

Sure, twenty-six year old Hizuri Kyoko had probably faced all kinds of scandals already. She would know how to deal with them. But this was really seventeen year old Mogami Kyoko, stuck inside her grown-up self’s body. And Mogami Kyoko was never recognised when she was out of character. She didn’t have to worry about scandals. 

Ren chewed his lip and twiddled his thumbs and sat there in a puddle of his own worry as his thoughts ruminated on his sort-of-girlfriend/legal-wife -- where she was and how she was doing and what she was thinking. 

“Ren,” Yashiro’s voice interrupted the sinkhole of thoughts, “if you’re that worried, just go home. There’s plenty of time. I can take a cab to TBM and meet you there.”

Ren frowned. “Are you sure?” he said. It felt unprofessional, somehow. 

“Well, you’ll work better after you reassure your heart,” said Yashiro. “Don’t forget, though: 4pm, TBM, studio 2.”

Ren didn’t need to be told twice. He just nodded as he grabbed his coat and his keys and started speed walking towards his car.

 

He parked in the basement parking lot of his apartment building and grabbed his card-key from the side pocket of his bag, heading towards the lifts. He swiped the card and pressed his floor number. The lift started with that sickening lurch that sent stomachs towards knees and Ren braced himself against the mirror-clad elevator wall. As had often happened since he woke up as a thirty year old, Ren caught himself staring at his reflection. At his short, blonde hair and his unmasked green eyes. It was so odd seeing Kuon out and about and free. He frowned at the stranger in the mirror. 

“How did you get out?” he asked Kuon.

It was a question he needed the answer to. He needed to know how he’d managed to overcome his trauma the first time. How had he managed to feel safe enough around himself to let Kuon have control of his body? What magic had he done?

Kuon didn’t reply. Instead, the elevator dinged, it’s own special elevator-language for ‘deal with your existential shit elsewhere’, and Ren walked out into the main corridor of his floor. He was still trying to answer his own question as he unlocked and opened the door to his apartment. 

“I’m home,” he called, half on reflex. There was no answer so he called again. “Hello? Kyoko?” Still nothing. “Babe?” He said the word in English, trying it out on his tongue.

He didn’t like it, he decided. It was far too ‘high school quarterback’ and he’d always been that nerdy, mixed-race kid in drama club with the famous parents. Or, at least, he  _ was _ . Until he decided to go against everything he had been taught and started using his martial arts on people he didn’t like. That was when the Kuon he had become was born.

He shook the memories from his head. Serves him right for dwelling on high school. Instead, he tried to get back onto the train of thought he’d been on before. 

What term of endearment would suit Kyoko best? It was a question that filled him with that sort of euphoric happiness that had engulfed him in waves this last week. The very thought that he was in a position to be actually calling her with pet names? It had been an impossibility twelve days ago.

He thought maybe ‘baby’ would work better than just plain ‘babe’ but had the feeling Kyoko wouldn’t like it. It didn’t translate well into Japanese at all. Calling someone a literal baby was not a term of endearment. Maybe ‘sweetheart’? But that sounded condescending somehow. 

Just then, her voice finally replied, “In the study!” and Ren dumped his bag at the door and headed towards the sound. 

Kyoko met him halfway, just outside the study door. “Welcome home,” she said with a smile.

“I’m home,” said Ren again because it hadn’t really felt like he was until he saw her. “What were you doing in the study? You weren’t sleeping on the floor again, were you?”

“I wasn’t!” said Kyoko, outraged at even the idea. “It’s work. I’m in an a video conference interview… thing.”

Ren frowned. “Right now?” 

Kyoko nodded.

“Well, you should get back to it,” he said. “You can't walk out halfway through an interview, even if it’s being done from your own home.”

Kyoko’s face fell with understanding and then a distraught wave washed over it as she realised she had basically done exactly that. It had felt so much like a casual conversation that she hadn’t even considered how unprofessional it would be to walk away from the computer. She's even almost told all about her and Shotaro’s relationship -- which was not a career-boosting story. 

“I didn’t think about it like that,” she mumbled. 

Ren opened the door to the study. “Get back in there, then,” he said with a small chuckle, trying to lighten that end-of-the-world expression he had managed to conjure onto her face.

“Are you sure I haven’t ruined everything?”

She really was upset about this and Ren worried whether he had said too much before. He reached one hand to her cheek and let all of his emotions show on his face.

Kyoko threw up a shield around her heart by sheer reflex at the dangerous smile. 

“Go in there,” he said, “and be your usual lovely self and I’m sure they’ll forget all about it.”

Kyoko nodded mutely. Honestly, she didn’t trust herself with words right then. 

“I’ll get out of your way, then,” he said and turned to head into the kitchen. He could make himself a cup of coffee without burning the entire apartment complex to the ground. Probably.

He heard Kyoko slide into the rolling chair again but, just as he took his first step to leave, a voice shouted after him. 

“Hizuri-san, wait!” The voice was tinny and unfamiliar and it took Ren a while to realise it was coming from the computer. 

He turned back around. 

He’d insisted they buy a new computer to replace the one their memory-loss had locked them out of but Kyoko had only given in when the request for this interview came through and she found out she couldn’t do it through the TV. It sat there on the desk, silver and sleek, with the face of an unknown woman staring out of it.

“Sorry for not introducing myself first,” said the woman on the screen as she bowed in her chair. “Good afternoon, I’m Hunkybookmark, I run a youtube channel and I have the pleasure of interviewing Kyoko-san today.”

Ren bowed his head in return. “Good afternoon. I’m Tsuruga Ren.” A thought floated through his head that perhaps he should have introduced himself as ‘Hizuri Kuon’, since he wasn’t working right then but he pushed it away. Force of habit was a scarily powerful thing and it was too late to change it now anyway.

Ayano resisted the urge to say ‘I know’ or even ‘well, duh’ and, instead said, “I’m sorry if this is an inconvenient time but an avalanche of tweets have just come in with questions for you so… if you wouldn’t mind…”

“I don’t mind,” said Ren. He had nothing to do until four anyway and Kyoko seemed perfectly fine. His worry had been for nothing. “But are you alright with this, Kyoko? Aren’t you supposed to be talking about your movie?”

“Oh, we’ve already done that,” said Kyoko breezily. 

“But you can always talk more about  _ Threads i _ f you want, Hizuri-san,” added Ayano.

“Alright then,” said Ren, defeated. He had a feeling that, by her use of his real name, he was attending this interview as The Husband rather than Tsuruga Ren. 

Kyoko shuffled over on the computer chair and gestured for him to sit down. Ren stared at the minuscule space skeptically for a moment before he turned around and went back out the door, after all. He returned a moment later with a chair from the dining table. 

“Okay,” he said as he settled himself in front of the screen. 

“Welcome, Hizuri-san,” said Ayano, falling right back into interview mode. “Now, before we get to that recent avalanche of tweets: did I hear you say that Kyoko-san sometimes sleeps on the floor in the study?”

Kyoko looked aghast -- that was a story from their awkward ‘married but not even in a relationship’ phase, after all -- but Ren just laughed. 

“Oh!” he said. “That’s just because she has a strange way of getting revenge on me if I don’t sleep in a bed. Say I’d fallen asleep in this room, working, or in front of the TV, Kyoko would refuse to sleep in a bed, too. She knows it makes me feel guilty so it works really well and I’m pretty careful about it these days.”

Kyoko smiled her ‘perfect hostess’ smile again to cover the complete shock on her face. That was a really good answer. It made them sound like a married couple with history who still cared about each other while, at the same time, being almost true.

Ayano laughed, pulled her paper list over in front of her and checked her twitter again, readying the next question.

The interview flowed quickly after that. Kyoko and Ren had such a fun dynamic -- one that neither of them actually knew they had before then -- that the whole thing felt natural and intimate and Ayano could practically feel her subscription numbers climbing. She tried to filter the questions and limit them to ones about their work, purposely leaving out the ones that said things like, ‘how many times a week do you two have sex?’ and similar. 

Until, at last, Ayano felt her phone buzz against her thigh again and, looking down, saw it wasn’t another tweet but, rather, the reminder she’d set to let her know she only had three minutes of the interview left.

She had to ask that question. 

“Look, it’s been great having you both, I’ve had some amazing fun and I’m sure our viewers have too, but we’re almost out of time. But, before we go, we just have to talk about that article.”

Ren felt Kyoko stiffen against his side but not an inkling of her discomfort showed on her face. She just cocked her head to one side, put on an expression of innocent bewilderment, and said, “what article?”

Ayano, being someone who liked to think of herself as a serious professional, no matter how others saw her career, didn’t give in.

“The article this morning, first posted on startracker.com, about Kyoko-san being seriously ill with terminal brain cancer,” she said in an even voice.

Kyoko made a face of quiet surprise laced with the perfect amount of confusion. Ren could have fallen in love with her all over again right then. The skill and confidence she was showing was astounding. She frowned a little and then looked up at him as if to say, ‘did you know about this?’ and he shook his head with a small shrug. Then she turned back to the interviewer with a bemused smile.

“I didn’t even know such an article existed, to be honest,” she said. “But I can assure you I’m quite healthy.”

 

***

 

Against the wishes of everyone involved, Hunkybookmark’s interview with Kyoko -- while doing wonders for her subscription numbers -- didn’t cool the flames around the rumour at all. If anything, it only made it worse. Fans and trolls alike pulled apart, picked at and put back together the look she had given the camera and the look she had given Ren, twisting it and contorting it until it fit their argument perfectly.

The comments on the video were littered with contradictions.

 

**I believe her. Look how innocent she looks!**

**\-- You’re forgetting she’s a professional actress. If she wants to look innocent she can.**

**\--- Exactly! Besides, did you see the way she looked to Kuon? That was such over the top confusion it’s obvious that she was acting.**

**\---- She just doesn’t want to hurt her career. So much for being an honest, modest person! I hope the cancer eats through her brain and she dies tomorrow.**

 

**Did anyone else notice Kyoko-san looked a bit pale?**

**\-- OMG! Yes! I did! Do you reckon it’s true, then?**

**\--- Oh, come on! That’s just the lighting!**

**\---- Don’t forget she’s also naturally pale.**

 

The fire burned on, pulling in anything within reach until it grew into an inferno. It had been smaller when there was only one truth -- that Kyoko had brain cancer and she was going to die -- but now that there were two, they fought against each other, building the fire higher and higher. 

 

***

 

Nao hung up the phone with a sigh and turned back to the others, gathered around the Hizuris’ living room again. Ren paced back and forth in front of the windows with his arms crossed and a scowl on his face. Nobody dared interrupt him. Kyoko sat neatly on the couch, ankles and knees together and her hands folded in her lap. Yashiro was the only one who honestly showed the exhaustion they all felt, sprawled on the other couch with one hand dramatically draped over his eyes. 

“The president says to release the scans,” said Nao. 

Yashiro bolted upright. “Does that mean we’re going to admit to the memory-loss?”

Nao shook her head. “No, we’re going to play it off as a regular appointment, a follow-up to the accident to see how her brain is healing long term.”

“Does that actually happen?” asked Kyoko quietly. “If it doesn’t this is still going to look very suspicious.”

“It happens often enough for this to be believable,” replied Nao. 

Kyoko nodded. 

Ren stopped pacing and turned towards the others, that withering scowl still on his face. 

“So?” he said. “When is this going to happen?”

“It will take a few days,” said Nao, flinching back from his face. “There’s a fair bit of paperwork to do. And I want to see if we can persuade Aoki-sensei to appear as well to explain them. He’s so memorably weird that the scans will be quickly forgotten.”

“Are you going to tell him that to persuade him?” asked Yashiro with a grin.

Nao rolled her eyes. “Of course I’m not,” she said. “I’ll say something wordy and clever and he’ll accept without complaint. I hope.”

“Have we decided where we’re going to do this?” asked Ren. “Which show?”

“I figured  _ Hello World  _ would be a good choice,” said Nao. “They often have those pseudo-medical segments so this won’t feel out of place.”

_ Hello World  _ aired on Thursday nights. Two days away. In just two days, the inner workings of Kyoko’s brain would be on display for all the world to see.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again, all!  
> So, we're approaching the end of the second arc but (I feel so bad doing this to you) I think I'm going to have to take a break for a while. I do have the next few chapters but I'm so dissatisfied with them that I don't want to post them until I've worked through this rough spot and can go back and fiddle with them to make them work. Also, I go back to uni tomorrow so I can't exactly tell you when I'll be back. I'm so sorry for leaving off like this. I promise, I will be back at some point. Until then... Sorry.
> 
> Okay, actual notes on this chapter:  
> There aren't many this week. The thing about 'baby' not translating well is entirely based on how much Nodame hates being called bébé in Nodame Cantabile so it could very well be very wrong.   
> Also, 'Hello World' is actually just the opening lyrics to that kids show about horse riding girls, The Saddle Club (ran 2001-2009, according to wikipedia. Also, apparently, an Australian-Canadian production. Who knew?). Which is the weirdest thing to name a talk show after but it was just the first thing that popped into my head at the time. I could have probably left this note off and you would never know.
> 
> Okay, I'm going to go now. I... um, really, thank you for sticking with me so far. I'll try to be back soon but... yeah, I can't make any promises. I guess I'll see you when I see you, then. Until next time,  
> Ocean.


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright. We're back. Sort of... It only took me ten months. I'm gonna be taking this super slow until I get back into the swing of things so.... yeah, apologies in advance. 
> 
> Massive MASSIVE thanks to [@razzlemafuckingdazzle](http://razzlemafuckingdazzle.tumblr.com/) on tumblr who is... just an absolute angel and practically held my hand for the whole last week or so as we both tried to winch this thing back from oblivion.  
> Okay! Onto the chapter! Enjoy!

“I don’t know if I should tell you this, Onoda-kun,” said Kanon, swirling her drink in her glass. 

The bar was quiet, it was too early for the real crowds to appear, and so all that filled the silence between the two was the soft jazz that wafted over from the speaker behind the bar.

“Then you shouldn’t, Kihara,” said Onoda. 

Kanon wasn’t exactly sure when he’d dropped the honorific but she didn’t find herself minding. 

A panicked look crossed her face. “But I feel like I’m going to explode if I don’t tell somebody!” she whispered frantically. 

“Then tell me,” he replied. 

“You make it sound so easy.”

“It is easy.”

Kanon only sighed, her head dropping onto her chest. It wasn’t easy. It was anything but easy. It was terrifying. Her entire career down the drain if she screwed this up. But people’s lives were at stake here. And she could always find a new job.

“So, what are you going to do?” Onoda’s voice broke her out of her thoughts. 

Kanon stared into her glass, at the amber liquid that sat, contained  _ \-- captured  _ within it. “Miyajima-san’s accepting bribes,” she said suddenly without looking up.

“What?” Onoda breathed.

“I think -- I mean, I’m almost certain he’s taking bribes from development companies in order to open up unsafe land for residential use.”

“Are you -- Are you sure? I mean, this is a pretty heavy accusation if you don’t have any proof… All the people who live in areas he's approved would be affected -- maybe in life threatening danger.”

Kanon looked at him. “I found a note, in a report. He recommended lifting restricted access sanctions around Fukushima. I’ve seen the geiger-counter readings from that area, Onoda-kun. There is no way we can guarantee that people living in that level of radiation will be safe.”

“Maybe he just… I don’t know. Maybe he missed something and he didn’t…” Onoda struggled for some sort of excuse.

“He didn’t miss a report, Onoda-kun,” said Kanon. “He’s done it before.”

“Before?”

“There’s an area of coastline up around Hokkaido that geologists predict will have fallen into the sea within ten years.”

“And he approved it for residential development?”

Kanon nodded. “It now has almost sixty thousand people living on it.”

Onoda blew out a long sigh between his teeth and ran a hand down his face. “Shit,” he said.

 

“ _ Cut!”  _ called Director Tono, sitting on the very edge of her chair as usual. She squinted at her two stars on set for a moment, wrinkling her nose before, finally, she nodded. “Alright,” she said. “That will do. Well done you two, that was a tough one to get right. It’s easy for the audience to get bored in dialogue heavy scenes but I think we’ve got it.”

Kyoko heaved a sigh of relief and Kihara Kanon flew out of her body with the breath from her lungs. That was their fourth take of that scene and it was beginning to feel a bit stale. She had the feeling that, if they’d had to go for a fifth, she would have only gotten worse from there. 

Sekine Seiichi stood up from the bar stool and stretched out his back, subtly moving away from his co-star as he did so. 

_ She’s married _ , he reminded himself.  _ She’s happily married and she might be dying. Just leave her alone _ . 

He’d often had to remind himself of this during the last few weeks of filming. Just as he’d feared, the more he worked with her, the closer Onoda and Kihara became, the more at risk he was of falling for Kyoko-san. 

She was beautiful. God was she beautiful but, obviously, that wasn’t all. Everyone knew she was beautiful. Seiichi was sure  _ she  _ knew she was beautiful. But she was also so amazingly talented and modest and cheerful and… he shook the train of thought from his head again.

_ She’s married _ , his brain reminded him yet again.  _ Besides, if she is dying, it wouldn’t be fair to add any more chaos into her life. _

Kyoko noticed her coworker’s staged stretching and felt her heart sink a little. He obviously thought she had brain cancer and was just lying to them all. He’d been doing this slight avoidance of her for the last few days. She was sure he hated her for her dishonesty and wished he could have nothing to do with her. 

She sighed and stood up. She had to head back to wardrobe to change for the next scene. 

 

***

 

_ Hello World  _ was filmed in the same studio that  _ Kimagure Rock _ used to be. Kyoko wasn’t exactly sure how she felt about that. Of course, things would move on in nine years and it was rare that a music/variety show would last that long but still, there was a sort of loneliness about walking back to that studio and knowing the Ishibashi nii-sans weren’t going to be there. 

As Kyoko quickly finished getting ready, adding one last layer of hairspray to keep any errant hairs down, she realised she didn’t even know what they were doing anymore. She hadn’t heard of Bridge Rock still being around as a band. And they weren’t hosting  _ Kimagure Rock  _ anymore, obviously. So, where had they gone? Were they even still in show-biz?

Just then, a knock came at the door. “Five minutes, Kyoko-san,” came the voice of one of  _ Hello World _ ’s runners through the door. 

“I’ll be right there,” she shouted back.

She put down the hair spray, gave herself one last long, determined look in the mirror, and then headed for the door. 

The runner, a crisply dressed but still rather clumsy young woman, lead Kyoko down the corridor to the studio. Not that she really needed anyone to show her the way. This studio was the birthplace of her career, after all. 

They had just turned the corner off the corridor with the dressing rooms, and were therefore only one corner away from the studio, when a voice called out from behind them.

“Kyoko,” said the voice and she froze. 

She knew that voice. It hadn’t changed in nine years. It still set her teeth on edge.

She turned slowly, careful not to let the look of absolute hatred leak out. After all, the runner was still standing right there and it wouldn’t do anyone any good for people to learn of the relationship between her and bastard no. 1. 

“Fuwa-san,” she said with an icy smile, all teeth and no eyes. “What a pleasant surprise.”

He had changed his looks in the last nine years. The ridiculous more-yellow-than-blonde hair was gone, replaced with an altogether more natural shade of brown. He’d grown it out, she noticed, and now it reached to his shoulders, though one side of his head had been shaved almost entirely bald. The hair might have been a more natural shade but he still wore all the trademarks of a visual-kei artist -- boots and buckles, chains and mesh, black and black and more black clothing. 

“I hear you have brain cancer,” he said without offering any greeting of his own.

Kyoko glared at him. “I’m dealing with it,” she said.

_ If someone had to fall out of show biz, why couldn’t it have been this bastard?  _ she thought.

“What’s that look for?” he asked, seeming genuinely surprised. “You haven’t glared at me like that for years unless I’ve done something really awful.”

She felt her eye twitch.

‘Something really awful’? Something  _ really awful _ ? Was manipulating her into working three jobs for a year, giving up on her own desires and forfeiting her future not something ‘really awful’? She gave up on high school for this bastard. She’d sentenced herself to living the rest of her life as a middle-school graduate and all the restrictions that brought with it and he’d just presumed that was only natural. 

She bit her tongue to keep herself from spitting something truly acidic at him.

“Well,” said Sho, “I’m glad to see you aren’t actually on death’s door. You go deal with it, then. I’ll see you ‘round.” 

Then he turned, waved once over his shoulder and sauntered off down the corridor, the buckles and belts of his outfit jangling musically as he went.

Was that it? That wasn’t a typical Shotaro encounter. That was no head-on collision. There’d been no yelling, no juvenile provocation, no belittling of her person. He’d behaved almost like an old friend. Just someone who’d heard some news about an acquaintance and was checking up on them.

Had she..? No, that seemed stupid. After everything he’d done? After the complete lack of repentance he’d shown? But maybe she had. 

She might have really made up with Sho in the last nine years. 

 

***

 

Hirose Natsu and Fukuda Aiko sat on their couch, Natsu’s legs draped over Aiko’s lap. The television was on but neither was really watching it. Aiko was on her phone, simultaneously texting her mother, chatting with a friend over facebook and scrolling through her instagram feed. Natsu was once again nose deep in her short story, trying to work up the courage to cut her favourite sentence. 

But then they both caught the words ‘Kyoko-san of the new film,  _ The Threads that Connect Us _ ’ spoken whisper-soft from the TV and all their attention immediately changed course. 

Aiko reached for the remote and turned it up.

“Don’t go anywhere because she’s coming in right after this break and, don’t forget, later, we’ll be talking to Tachibana Kouki about his latest work,” the host, a forty-something year old woman, was saying.

It speaks volumes for Aiko and Natsu’s love of Kyoko that, in their anticipation of her arrival, neither of them went back to their tasks during the ad break. They just sat there -- Natsu’s laptop forgotten on her knees and Aiko sitting with one leg tucked underneath her, one hand on Natsu’s calf in her lap -- and waited for their favourite actress to appear. 

They sat riveted through the commercial break, eyes glued to the screen despite their disinterest in the advertise products, until the TV chimed and  _ Hello World _ ’s theme song began to play. The heavily made-up host stood in the middle of the stage, soaking in the applause with arms thrown wide, highlighted from every angle by spotlights as the camera panned around the studio to show the audience, as if to prove the show was indeed popular. Eventually the woman held up her hands to quiet the crowd. 

“Welcome!” she said. “Welcome back to  _ Hello World _ . I hope you all made the most of the break because I can guarantee you won’t want to move from that seat for the rest of the show. 

“My next guest is a film and television actress that, really, needs no introduction. But I’m going to give her one anyway because I love her.” The host winked at the camera and another ten seconds of applause started up before she quieted them again. “She’s been in everything from the dark and dramatic  _ Dark Moon _ , to the light and fluffy  _ Ten Men, Ten Colours _ . Her movie  _ The Threads that Connect Us _ came out this week and she has a new drama starting in just a fortnight. She’s the amazingly hard-working, amazingly talented, Kyoko-san!”

The camera panned out again as the host gestured towards the back of the stage. Spotlights danced and music played and then Kyoko-san was there. One perfectly sculpted leg, clad in tight jeans and ladybug spotted, wedged heels, stepped onto the stage, followed by another. Kyoko’s hips swayed with every step to keep her balanced on her heels as she walked in a wide arc to her seat, brilliant smile plastered on her face as she waved to the audience, bathed in the applause and cheers. 

“Kyoko-san!” Aiko whisper-cheered from her place on the couch. “Do your best!”

Natsu gave her girlfriend a knowing smile, guilt pulling at the corners of her eyes. They both knew the real reason for this interview. And if Kyoko-san really was dying… No, they didn’t want to think about it. 

By then, Kyoko had finally reached her seat, sitting back and crossing her ankles in an action that seemed just a bit too intentionally casual to be real.

“Kyoko-san,” said the host, still battling against the last of the cheers. “Kyoko-san, welcome to the show.”

Kyoko looked to the audience and, in a rare display of over-confidence, placed one finger to her lips to signal quiet before she spoke. It only prompted a single lovesick squeal before the crowd fell silent.

“Yes, it’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me,” she said. 

“I saw the new film,” said the host, “and it’s so adorably quirky!”

Natsu and Aiko sat, all other tasks forgotten, glued to the screen. Aiko’s phone continued to buzz with messages from her mum but she left it where it was on the coffee table. Kyoko-san was more important. 

Kyoko and the host talked about the movie for a few minutes and then the upcoming drama for a few more but, for a ten minute interview, it seemed to be running a bit quickly. Then came the question that showed the real priorities of the host. 

“Now, Kyoko-san,” said the host, “I think we’re all dying to know -- if you’ll pardon the expression -- if you’re still going to be around to make more of these amazing projects in a few years.”

Kyoko looked confused for a moment and then she laughed. She  _ laughed _ . That took Aiko and Natsu by surprise a little. 

“Oh, that?” said Kyoko. “Really, that whole thing has been completely blown out of proportion.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Kyoko shook her head with a small smile as if to say ‘oh dear, the media circus has done it again’. “It was just a regular checkup. A follow-up test from my accident -- oh, you know my accident, don’t you?”

Natsu wondered if she was the only one who could see how tense Kyoko-san was. She really hoped so. It wouldn’t do her idol any good to have this mess dragged out any longer. 

“Oh, yes!” said the host and then she turned to the camera. “For those of you who don’t know, Kyoko-san was in a rather serious car crash nine years ago that left her in a coma for two weeks.” Then she turned back to Kyoko. “So this whole brain cancer thing is just hearsay?”

“No, I went for the scans,” said Kyoko, “but I think that, somewhere along the line, someone added in the cancer part of the story.” She paused for a moment. “I guess… I mean, if we really want to put this thing to rest, I do have the scans with me today?”

Massive cheer from the audience. Screams and clapping and Kyoko’s name being called over and over. 

The host touched her earpiece for a moment amidst the chaos. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, it looks like we can have a look at those.” She stood up and gestured for Kyoko to follow. “Kyoko-san, if you’ll just step this way.”

The host lead the way from the couch to a small area with a bench in front of a large screen. Natsu recognised it as the one they often used to flog new wonder-diets and shockingly cheap clothes. No sooner had Kyoko and the host stopped in front of the screen, then displaying the show’s logo, than it changed to the characteristic backlit blue-grey and white of a series of  X-rays. 

It must be of a brain, because that’s what Kyoko-san said it was, but Aiko and Natsu both thought it could just as well have been her liver and they wouldn’t have known the difference. 

“So, what’s going on here, Kyoko-san?” said the host.

Kyoko laughed again. “Oh, I have no idea!”

“What?”

“No, I can’t read the scans but I’ve brought along someone who can. You don’t mind, do you?”

“No, no, of course not!” said the host and Natsu suspected that this extra guest had been prearranged by how nonplussed she was by the sudden addition.

“Then, can I ask Aoki Eito-sensei, my radiologist, to come up on stage?” said Kyoko timidly.

The music played again and a middle aged man, slightly rat-faced and with his hair greying at the temples, dressed in a white lab coat hopped up the steps and onto the stage to a wave of cheers. The cheers weren’t nearly as loud as they had been for Kyoko but they were still louder than seemed logical for a man they had never met before. 

“Golly,” said Aoki as he reached his patient’s side, “I think that’s the biggest round of applause I’ve ever gotten for just arriving. There’ve been close seconds but none quite  _ that  _ big.”

A ripple of laughter ran through the crowd. 

“Whoa, and they laugh at my jokes, too!” said Aoki, seemingly unfazed by the sudden attention, and the audience laughed again. 

The host gave her own (obviously fake) laugh. “Well, Aoki-sensei, welcome to  _ Hello World _ .”

Aoki bowed his head politely.

“Could you talk us through these scans?” continued the host. “Where’s the cancer, if there is any? Should we be worried about Kyoko-san’s immediate future?”

“Immediate future?” said Aoki. “Of course not! Haven’t you looked at these things? For someone who was hit by a truck and then lay in a coma for two weeks these scans are disappointingly boring.”

“How so?” said the host.

“Well,” said Aoki, striding closer to the screen. “I know from her records that she suffered an acute subdural haematoma but there’s absolutely no lasting effects on the brain. Even a concussion can cause permanent damage in some cases so I was rather surprised to find that --”

“Uh, Sensei?” interrupted Kyoko. “You might need to explain what an acute sub… whatever that was. You might need to explain what it is.”

“Really?” said Aoki. “I thought that was common knowledge. What are they teaching in schools nowadays?”

“Well, some people might know it but not everyone will and those people might feel a bit left out if you don't explain.”

“Right. Of course,” he said. “Essentially, the brain is suspended within the skull, floating in a series of membranes and fluids that protect it from the bumps and knocks of everyday life. It’s nothing like what a woodpecker has, of course, the trabeculae inside their skull help to hold the brain in place. Otherwise they’d give themselves concussion when they rammed their head against solid wood! How about that for a work of evolution? Anyway, a subdural haematoma is a collection of blood in this surrounding layer, rather than in the brain itself. The bleeding is usually from the brain but the actual haematoma is just that blood in the meninges that builds up and puts pressure on the brain. That pressure can then, in turn, block other blood vessels and the like -- potentially deoxygenating and killing entire portions of the brain. Incidentally, the meninges is where meningitis occurs. That’s an infectio--”

“Uh --” Kyoko interrupted and Aoki-sensei turned on his heel to face her with an eyebrow raised. “Perhaps you should…” Remain on topic?

She left the sentence there but Aoki seemed to pick up on the meaning well enough.

“Right,” he said, clearing his throat. “Subdural haematoma can be caused -- and is often caused -- by an impact to the skull, such as might be sustained in a car accident.”

“And there’s no lasting damage?” asked the host.

“Well, in some cases there is. In a lot of cases there is, actually. And there’s always a danger of long term injury with neurological conditions. Which is why we had Hizuri-san -- I mean Kyoko-san -- come back for another scan. She’ll probably be having them every few years for the rest of her life.”

“But there's no lasting damage to her brain that has been found so far?”

“No.” A rare, one word answer from Aoki-sensei. 

“What’s this black bit here?” The host seemed determined to find something horrible and life threatening and she pointed to a particular blank spot in the scans. “Looks all dead to me.”

Aoki-sensei draped one hand across his eyes dramatically. “Without even looking, I’m going to say it’s a sinus of some sort.”

Aiko laughed on the couch. “I like this guy,” she said. “He’s a total dork.”

Before Natsu could reply, Aoki had removed his hand and gestured towards the scan with a flourish.

“I knew it!” he said and the audience laughed again. “The maxillary sinus! That’s not even in the brain.” He put two fingers on his face, one each side of his nose. “It’s in the skull. That scan was just to be sure there were no previously overlooked fractures intruding into the intracranial space.”

The host gave a dramatic sigh and threw her hands in the air. “There you have it, folks!” she said. “We’ve had a good nosy around in Kyoko-san’s brian and there’s nothing to see. No tumour, no nothing. Too bad for the gossips but I, for one, am incredibly relieved that our Kyoko-san is healthy and can continue to work her magic on the screen for many more years to come. 

“Hang around because, after the break, Tachibana Kouki is coming up and then we have a musical performance from Fuwa Sho to take us out. See you in a bit!”

The show cut to commercials and Aiko and Natsu sat back on the couch with a sigh of relief. Aiko muted the TV again and went back to her phone. Natsu pulled her laptop onto her knees once more and got back to work. 

Both bathed in the relief of knowing, not only that their idol was not dying, but that their loose lips had not cause her  _ too much  _ trouble.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so ends the second arc.  
> How was it? Worth the wait? (pfft. nothing is worth that long a wait) We have our usual couple of transition chapters next and then we're into the third and final arc. Things are just gonna get hotter from here! (hopefully)
> 
> I can't tell you exactly when I'll be back again. If I finish the chapter I'm currently working on this week, I'll see you all next sunday. If not, I'll see you the week after. Let's try not to have more than a fortnight between updates ever again.
> 
> Alright. Imma go now. Hope you've all had a lovely last 10 months, that you'll forgive me for being gone so long, and that you all have an amazing christmas tomorrow (if you celebrate it) or just a monday more tolerable than mondays usually are if you don't. I hope you have a glorious monday!  
> 'Till next time,  
> Ocean.


	18. Chapter 18

Kyoko managed to walk from the studio, through the backstage area, down three corridors and into her dressing room before she melted into a puddle of embarrassed sludge. 

“Well done,” said Nao to the puddle. “That should sort it all out. There’ll probably be a few fans who will continue to drag this around for awhile but any casting director who doesn’t believe this doesn’t deserve to work with you.”

“Thank you,” replied Kyoko. 

Inside her head, though, she said, ‘oh my God! I can’t believe I just did that! I was so self important. I actually dared to shush the audience! Who on earth did I think I was? Some sort of big shot Hollywood actress? I knew I should have never channelled Box R’s Natsu.’

Kyoko shuffled over to a chair and sat down. The chair was the very same one she’d sat in almost an hour earlier as she fixed that last layer of hairspray to her head. Despite that, her hair was now full of the frizz and flyaways that only stress could bring on. She stared at herself in the mirror. But her attention didn’t remain long on her hair. The hair was expected but the overwhelming relief in her eyes was less so. She’d expected to feel tired, maybe a bit accomplished. But not relieved.

It was over. She’d done it and the ordeal was over. If anyone brought it up again she could just brush it off or refer back to this interview. It was all over. 

And maybe now she could go back to getting treated. Maybe now she could find her memories. 

She had the sudden urge to call Ren. He was her anchor when the sea of emotions got too wild. When she was stuck with an act and she needed help, she called Tsuruga-san. When she felt like she was going to go out of her mind with anxiety from meeting her mother, she called Tsuruga-san. When she’d just overcome her first scandal -- she wanted to call Tsuruga-san. He’d get her back on even ground. Until he did, she’d just keep feeling…  _ itchy _ .

“Akechi-san,” she said. “What’s Ren-san doing at the moment?”

Nao pulled out her tablet and quickly flicked away from Kyoko’s detailed schedule to Ren’s basic one that Yashiro tended to give her at the beginning of each week. 

“Well,” she said, “if he’s still on schedule, he should be filming  _ Gone for Good _ right now.”

Kyoko frowned. “I thought his character left that show.”

“He was promoted to a different division but still turns up sometimes.”

“Oh,” said Kyoko. 

So he was busy. She’d just have to put up with the itchy feeling until he got home. Then she’d have him cast that soothing magic over her.

 

***

 

Hisato stared down at her. Just twelve years old and there she was, laid out on a metal tray in a pristine lab, a jagged Y stitched over her chest from where the pathologist had sewed her back together post-autopsy. She’d been alive thirty-six hours ago. She’d been in horrible danger but she’d been alive. 

He sighed and ran his hands through his hair. He felt sick but he refused to close his eyes. He just stared down at her. He had done this. He wasn’t fast enough, he wasn’t good enough, he had done this to an innocent, twelve year old girl just as surely as if he’d murdered her himself. 

Maybe, in that way, the first division was better. At least there, all the victims were already dead. It hadn’t been his negligence that had killed them. In the fourth division, they were all still alive and had no one to save them from their abductors but him. 

He'd forgotten what that felt like and was suddenly incredibly grateful for his promotion. 

He heard the door behind him swing open and closed but he didn’t turn around. How could he when his guilt was lying right there, cold and lifeless on the metal tray?

“Ichinose,” said Chief Miyamoto’s voice from behind him. Hisato still didn’t turn. “We got it. The confession, I mean. We got it at last.”

Hisato nodded. Yes, they got the bastard but not fast enough. Not nearly fast enough. 

“Somehow,” said Hisato, “this doesn’t really look like a victory.”

Chief Miyamoto walked up beside him and looked down at the victim’s face as well.

No, she wasn’t ‘the victim’. She was Kawasaki Aya, student at Washio Elementary School, older sister, daughter, friend. 

She was  _ twelve _ . Hisato had to keep reminding himself that. What had he been doing when he was twelve? Playing soccer and baseball and hanging out with his friends, probably. Getting muddy, climbing trees, falling down and scraping his knees. He had definitely never considered the possibility that he might get abducted by one of the most disgusting examples of a human being. It just wasn’t something that twelve year olds should have to think about. Yet… there was Aya, cold and still and  _ dead _ , lying there on the autopsy table at twelve. 

And it was all because he had been too slow.

Chief Miyamoto clasped one hand on Hisato’s shoulder. “It never does in these sorts of cases,” he said. Then he turned to leave. He stopped at the door again and turned back to Hisato. “By the way, good work today, Ichinose. You’ve never thought of asking for a transfer? We’d always welcome you back.”

Hisato forced his eyes away from Aya for a moment so that he could turn towards his ex-boss. So Miyamoto could see the tears of self reproach that had gathered in his eyes. Then he turned back to the metal tray and the corpse of a little girl. 

“No,” he said. “I’m fine where I am, thank you.”

It felt selfish to stay away from the living victims like that but he wasn’t nearly strong enough to survive too many days like today.

 

“ _ Cut! _ ” the director tried to say. It was squelchy and high pitched through his tears. “That’s the one,” he managed to choke out. “We’re using this take. Thanks everyone. That’s a wrap on season three, episode six. Thank you all for your hard work.”

“Don’t cry, Director!” someone shouted from the back of the room. “We’re all going to be here again tomorrow. We’ve still got seventeen and a half episodes in this season to film!”

“Well,” someone else added, “all of us except Tsuruga-san.”

“That’s right,” said the director, rising from his chair and walking over to where Ren still stood on set. He caught Ren by his upper arms, tears still streaming down his face. “Thank you so much, Tsuruga-kun,” he said. “I’m so happy you could come back to the show to film these two episodes.”

“Please don’t cry, Director,” said Ren. “Look, ‘Aya’ is just a silicone dummy. She’s not really a dead child. And I was glad I could come back. I had a lot of fun filming this show before.” 

Whether he’d actually had fun or not, he couldn’t remember. But it wasn’t really the point, anyway. The point was that he said he’d had fun. That was all that really mattered to maintain his good relationship with this director, producer and all the staff. 

“Just so long as there’s not another mayonnaise incident, eh?” the director joked.

Ren felt his mind flounder for a moment before he laughed, hoping that was the right reaction. “Yes,” he said, “never again, thanks.”

The director laughed then, too, and clapped him firmly on the shoulder once. “Well I can’t direct the mayonnaise gods. But thank you,” he said again. “I might have to ask you to come back again sometime, if you enjoyed it so much.”

Ren let his laugh die into a chuckle but kept a carefully jovial smile on his face. He really hoped he never had to reprise and reanalyse a role he didn’t remember doing again. First Ushio now Hisato. He’d much rather start from scratch. At least there’d been a slight advantage with  _ Gone for Good _ over  _ Convictions _ in that he had watched the box-set of both season one and two of  _ GfG _ . He could see how he’d once played Hisato, even if it was so much better than he was capable of doing that it didn’t look like him on the screen anymore. In  _ Convictions _ he’d been running blind.

“Well,” one of the lighting guys said, “why don’t we all go out somewhere? To celebrate Tsuruga-san’s wrap on eps five and six?” A cheer rose up from the staff in response. “That is,” said the lighting guy again, “if it works okay with your schedule. I know you’re a busy guy.”

Ren looked to Yashiro, leaning against a wall at the back of the studio, out of the way, who pulled his arms into a circle over his head, thought for a moment, then made a K with his fingers and shrugged. Ren could only take that to mean, ‘you’re okay unless you have something planned with Kyoko-chan’. 

He didn’t have anything planned with Kyoko. Nothing official, anyway. It was the day she had her big interview and he really wanted to check in on her. But that seemed like an overreaction, going by how the last time he got overly worried and went to check on her had gone. She’d been perfectly fine then. Not even ruffled. 

So, while feeling incredibly uneasy, he smiled and said, “It’s alright. I have plenty of time. Let’s go.”

He did, however, send her a message before they left. 

 

**To: Kyoko**

**The cast and crew are going out for drinks to celebrate wrapping episodes five and six. I’ll try to be home by eleven. Are you okay after** **_Hello World_ ** **? Call me if you need anything. Thinking of you.**

 

He stared at that last sentence for a full minute, debating whether or not to leave it in. But that was fine, wasn’t it? That was a normal thing for someone who is sort-of-dating/legally married to send to their partner. Right? It didn’t sound creepy at all. Kind of. He definitely wasn’t going to freak her out by saying that. Probably. And he absolutely wasn’t going to regret it. Maybe.

In the end, he just shut his eyes, hit send, and hoped for the best. 

 

***

 

It didn’t happen often but, sometimes, Kyoko amazed herself with what she was capable of cooking while absent minded. While her mind flip-flopped between her emotionally exhausting day and Tsuruga-san’s ‘thinking of you’, her hands had already almost finished a meat & potato dish and a miso soup. 

She stopped and stared down at the dishes, bubbling away on the stove. She checked the time and sighed. It wasn’t even ten-thirty yet. Tsuruga-san wouldn’t be home for at least another half an hour. If she kept going at this pace, she’d be long finished and the food gone cold by the time he got home. So she slowed down, didn’t start cooking the rice, stopped preparing the fish and just focused on the two side dishes she was already making. She’d start the others when these ones were done.

So, when Ren got home at exactly 11:14, the entire apartment smelled delicious. He called his greetings and Kyoko’s smiling face appeared from around the corner. 

“Welcome home,” she said, still dressed in an apron and Ren felt like he must have died and gone to heaven with how domestic the scene was. 

“I’m home,” he said again as his brain short circuited and couldn’t come up with anything else to say. 

Kyoko laughed. “You already said that.”

“So I did,” Ren replied. “What are you cooking? You’ve already had dinner, right?”

Kyoko looked incredibly sheepish. Maybe she’d done something wrong in waiting for him. He seemed almost upset. 

“I thought I’d wait until you got home,” she said. “I didn’t get home until almost ten anyway.” 

Ren’s face softened and his mind started running through that list of pet names he’d been compiling on Sunday. God, he wished he had the guts to say one right then. 

“Kyoko-chan,” he said instead, gathering his courage to reach out and squeeze her hand.

The fear fell away from her face at his tone and her smile took its place once more.

It seemed odd that he was still so afraid of rejection even after their feelings became mutual. It shouldn’t be like this. Neither of them should have to live like this; in fear, on edge. This should be their honeymoon period, all smooth sailing and smiles. But it wasn’t. Even without their current crisis, even if they’d managed to get together nine years ago, they were never going to have that easy, smooth period in their relationship. That was forfeit the moment Fuwa Sho took advantage of a naive, lovesick teenage girl.

“So,” he said with a quiet smile, hiding his absolute elation carefully in order not to frighten her, “What’s for dinner?”

 

The two ate quickly and quietly in front of the TV. They’d finished the recap of their own careers a few days before and had moved on to ‘everything else significantly popular released in the last nine years’. There was a lot. 

They didn’t take notes this time. These weren’t works they were expected to know like the back of their hands. They were just works they were expected to have probably heard of. So they just sat and watched and tried to ignore the fact that every new drama or movie they started was all proof of how much time they had lost. 

Kyoko sat in what had become her usual place on the couch; on the right, curled up next to the armrest. And Ren sat closer to the middle, trying to hide that he was only sitting there in order to be a little bit closer to her. 

Suddenly, Kyoko laughed. The scene on the screen wasn’t particularly funny -- it showed an actress bawling her eyes out as her lover walked away -- so Ren looked at her quizzically. 

“Oh, I was just wondering what Amamiya-san would think of this actress,” she said.

“Amamiya-san?” asked Ren.

“The third LoveMe girl. We worked together on Box R.”

“Ah,” said Ren. Then she was probably that pig-tailed side-kick girl from the drama. The one with that chilling bullying scene. “What would she think about this actress?”

Kyoko looked at him for a long moment and then shook her head. “Probably nothing very nice,” she said. 

Somehow, sitting that ‘little bit closer’ was making Ren feel the distance between them even more. The air between them felt cold. He could have sworn there was some sort of draft flowing through the gap, despite the obviously high-end, air-tight apartment. That ‘little bit closer’ marked a wall. That was as close as he was allowed without asking permission. The unspoken barrier between them. 

“Kyoko-chan,” he said, seemingly suddenly to her, “you… you do know I love you, right?”

Kyoko flushed bright pink and mumbled a garbled, “Yes.”

“It’s just that not a lot has really changed.”

She stared at him with her blushing face, bottom lip trembling ever so slightly. “What would you like to change?” she whispered. 

Ren looked away and Kyoko’s blush somehow got even darker. What was he thinking about that meant he couldn’t meet her eyes? 

The sound of the television and the actress’ sub-par acting came steadily into the otherwise silent room for a long moment. 

“Could I touch you?” he asked at last.

“Touch me!” squeaked Kyoko, shielding as much of her body from view with her hands as possible.

“No!” said Ren, reaching out. “No! Not like that! I didn’t mean it like that.” He took a deep breath. “I just meant, could I get a little closer?”

Kyoko thought about it for a second before, slowly, nodding and Ren shuffled closer.

His fingers touched her waist. “Okay?” he asked and she nodded. His arm reached around her shoulder. “Still okay?” She nodded again. He let his weight lean against her, felt her warmth pressed all along his side, and pulled her even closer. “Still, still okay?” he mumbled, his nose almost entirely buried in her hair. It took a moment but she nodded all the same. “Good,” he said. 

Kyoko’s head was empty. She’d gone passed shock and straight to total shut-down where there were no words, no feelings, nothing in her head except the ever probing knowledge that she could  _ feel  _ Tsuruga Ren’s heart beating. He was so close. And maybe three weeks ago she might have asked him to move away -- maybe a week ago she might have asked him to move away but now… Now she craved it. Through all the embarrassment and all the uncertainty of not knowing how she was supposed to react, Kyoko still found herself wishing he would press even closer still.

She hadn’t really thought that this could possibly be worse than that kiss they’d shared after Tsuruga-san got back from Borneo. After all, what was a hug compared to a kiss? But this was longer, warmer and she wasn’t distracted by  _ other things _ so she could feel all of him against her. Warm and solid and thrumming with life. 

Her heart was beating about three times faster than was healthy. She was blushing so hard it felt like she was on fire. Her throat was tight. She was sure she was sweating buckets. But, even with all this, she was filled with this strange sense of happiness. She felt warm and the real world was so far away from the little nook that Tsuruga-san had carved out for her in his arms. 

It definitely didn’t feel like home. She was far too nervous for that. But it might have felt a bit like a sleepover. Exciting and new and with all the flighty nervousness that came with sleeping in someone else’s room for the first time. 

Tsuruga-san said something, mumbled it into her hair again, but she completely missed it in all her revelling. 

“Huh?” she said, jolting where she sat. 

Ren chuckled and she felt his breath ghost across her neck. She swallowed thickly. 

“I said, can you still see the TV like this?” he said again. She could hear the smile in his words.

She nodded quickly, bumping his nose against her skull in the process. “Yes! Yes, it’s all fine.” 

She had the feeling, though, that even with unimpaired vision she still wouldn’t be able to remember much of what they watched that night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It is so hot right now and it is not conducive to writing at all. There's always this atmosphere of just *waiting* on really hot days; when even the flies are crawling like drunkards in the shade and we're all laying as still as possible inside, the fan on full force, just waiting and waiting for the sun to go down and the heat to lull at least a little. We nap our way through hot days like a three day long siesta. It's a reverse hibernation, sleeping through the summer in order to survive. But the heat's not going away with the sun this time. It was still 34'C at midnight in my room last night. I'll just have to hang in there until a storm sweeps through and blows it away.  
> I guess, what I'm saying is, I'm writing really slowly at the moment. But I'll stick to my promise of no more than a fortnight between updates. 
> 
> I've also sort of been working on writing out this whole episode of Gone for Good -- just when I can be bothered, between projects -- and was wondering if anyone would be interested in reading it, if I ever finish it?
> 
> Anywho... I'll go now. I hope you liked that chapter? There was some setting up for the next arc in there, some solid groundwork ;) Let me know what you think! Same rules as last time -- if I finish the chapter I'm currently working on, I'll be back next week. If I don't, I'll see you the week after. 'Till then,  
> Ocean.


	19. Chapter 19

Kyoko had learnt her lesson from the last time and didn’t try and squeeze in the third pregnancy test before work. Still, there wasn’t a lot of time when she was alone in the apartment. Some days there was none at all and she didn’t really like the idea of doing this in some public restroom somewhere -- either at LME or the studio or just out on the street. So it wasn’t exactly a week after the previous test but a few days more that she took her last one. The one that would either guarantee her current life or turn everything on its head.

But she had to do it today. She was working all of the next day and then catching an overnight train to Kyoto immediately afterwards. It had to be now.

She had just over an hour before Ren came home. He was off being a judge on some lifestyle show. But, she was almost certain that she’d need the full hour.

As the days passed, she was becoming increasingly worried about this particular test. She’d been sick the last three mornings. Her head felt heavy and her feet, while not actually swollen, were unusually red. And if it was positive, as she was trying to steel herself to accept, then she’d need the extra time before Tsuruga-san got home to recover from all the tears she’d undoubtedly cry. 

Everything had to appear normal by the time he got back.

He could never know she’d ever been so scared about something so stupidly unavoidable. Neither of them could be blamed for things they don’t remember doing. Even if those things could affect them both for the rest of their lives.

So she sat and watched the test sitting on a tissue on top of the coffee table and waited and tried not to preemptively cry. But everything seemed so far away and she was so scared and she felt so useless and out of uncontrol.

When the results finally appeared, Kyoko did cry. But they were tears of relief. Still negative. The sickness was probably stress or placebo. She was still safe. Reality was still comprehensible.

In a dazed relief, she chucked both the test and the empty box in the bin and headed into the kitchen to start on dinner. Ren would be home soon and she wanted to greet him with a smile.

 

***

 

“I don’t think I called for you,” said Miyajima slowly, without looking up. 

Kanon didn’t reply. She just shut the door slowly, purposefully behind her and then dropped a thick printed document onto her boss’ desk.

He looked up then. He slid one eye from his computer screen, to the title of the document and then to Kanon’s face, like a toad watching a fly, mapping its movements so it could go in for the kill. 

Kanon pressed her lips together and pushed her chin in the air defiantly.

Miyajima glared at her for a moment before his gaze dropped back to the document. He licked a finger and turned one page, then another. Then he closed it and slid his hand over the cover, as if smoothing out any evidence that he had looked at it at all. 

“Where did you get this?” he said evenly. 

Kanon bit her tongue as a wave of fear washed over her. “That doesn’t matter.” She tried to make the words as chilling as she could.

Miyajima looked down at the report again as if carefully considering what she’d just said. The muscles in his jaw clenched once and then he pushed it away distastefully.

“Yes, it does,” he said. “Where did you get _this_?”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Kanon again. “What matters is that you have done _this_ \--” she jabbed a finger towards the report, not caring if she came across as rude, “-- and _this_ is not okay.”

Miyajima was sweating but Kanon couldn’t be sure whether it was just his usual sweatiness or if she was actually getting to him. He licked his lips, further reinforcing his toad-like image, and a slow smile spread across his face.

“Go home, girlie,” he said. “You don’t know what you’re dealing with.”

“I’m going to report you.” She watched the muscle in his jaw clench again. “I don’t care what you say now,” she went on. “I’m only here to give you fair warning. I know what you are and I’m going to report you.” 

Then she turned on her heel to leave. Just as her hand fell on the door handle, he spoke again.

“You’ve been in this job -- what? One month? Two? You’re not even an elected member. I could ruin you. Think about that.”

Facing away from him, towards the door, Kanon let the fear pass over her face for a moment before she took a deep breath and forced the steel into her eyes again. 

She turned to glare him down. “Not if I ruin you first.”

Then she marched out the door, getting the sleeve of her blazer caught on the handle as she went and accidently pulling herself to a jarring stop.

“Blegh!” she cried as Newton’s third law pulled her backwards, crashing into the frosted-glass door and rattling it in its frame.

 

“ _ Cut! Cut! _ ” cried the director. “Ah, Kyoko-chan! We were so close! That was such a good take.”

“Sorry, Director Tono!” said Kyoko, trying to untangle her sleeve from the door handle. 

How on earth had that even happened? It was definitely not-Kanon. Kanon was deliberately elegant and poised, she moved gracefully and dangerously like a tigress. And, yes, she was actually a total mess of anxiety and self-image problems beneath that but this wasn’t a comedy show. It made no sense for her goofiness to turn up in that sort of situation.

Hara-san laughed from where he still sat behind her at Miyajima’s desk and Kyoko’s embarrassment magnified three-fold. It was like she was proving him right by making such a mess of things. 

She yanked her sleeve free in one pull and turned to face him, falling into a bow.

“I’m sorry for causing this delay, Hara-san,” she said.

He just scoffed and waved his hand through the air. “No, no! Keep going, this is far more entertaining than the actual scene.”

Kyoko bristled at both his unprofessionalism and the undercurrent of implication that her serious acting was worse than her almost pulling a door out of its frame. She gritted her teeth and stood up straight again. She was going to get it perfect next take. Then we’d see if he was still laughing.

 

***

 

Kyoko was getting complacent with her tests. The media coverage had died down enough to let her go back to Aoki-sensei for the re-scans and they’d come back just as normal as the first ones had.Not to mention the shocking relief that was her third pregnancy test. She really was all clear. She was starting to think there was nothing wrong with her at all. No baby. No brain damage. The memory loss must have just been the work of a curse. An evil witch had been angry that Kyoko was leaving all her grudge behind and had cursed her to forget her happiness and be vengeful for all eternity again. 

But ‘all clear’ results lead down the dangerous path of complacency and complacency invariably leads to mistakes. 

She had to board her train to Kyoto in forty minutes -- the continuation of the press tour for  _ The Threads that Connect Us _ . She was going first to Kyoto and then Hokkaido and back to Tokyo all in the space of one weekend. She couldn’t spare any more time than that off shooting for  _ Cross the Floor _ . 

She threw her toothbrush into her bag as it lay on her bed and zipped it up, hoisting it onto her shoulder, and turned to leave. Tsuruga-san stood in the doorway. He leant there with his legs crossed and his weight supported on his shoulder against the frame.

He looked worried, maybe even a bit hurt, and Kyoko stopped at his expression alone.

“What is it?” she asked.

He looked at her in silence for a moment more, his brow furrowed in something that might have been pain but could just as easily have been confusion, before he reached behind him and pulled something out of his back pocket. It was a small, blue and white cardboard box, long and narrow, that had been crushed flat.

Kyoko recognised it instantly as the one her final pregnancy test had come in.

“I found this,” he said quietly.

Kyoko didn’t say anything.

“Kyoko-chan, you’re not --”

“No,” she interrupted. “I’m not. It was just a precaution.”

“But you were worried,” he said.

There was a long pause before Kyoko gave the tiniest of nods.

Ren stepped forward. He wasn’t sure whether he was allowed to touch her right then. Given the nature of her fear, he didn't feel as if he could. Their relationship was so strange already and now… now he had made her fear for something by herself for weeks -- something that would be  _ at least  _ half his fault if it had come to fruition. But he wanted to touch her. He wanted to wrap her in his arms and hold her until that lost expression melted off her face. 

That’s not to say that he wouldn’t be happy if the test had been positive. He’d probably be so happy, he’d cry. But he knew it wouldn’t be what she wanted, no matter how much she would undoubtedly smile while she told him, hide her tears in a dark corner, and try to cover her fear with acting. It was not what she wanted. So he didn’t say anything about what might have been.

“I’m sorry,” is what he said instead.

“What for? You didn’t do anything,” she said.

“I might have.”

Kyoko shifted uncomfortably on the ground. This was not a topic she wanted to talk about in the slightest. It brought back images of that first morning in the future. Nakedness and confusion and fear. Feeling dirty and tainted, crying in the closet and hoping the ground would swallow her up.

“Even then, it wouldn’t have been you. You don’t remember so it wasn’t you,” she said quietly. 

That was it. That look. That fear as her eyes downturned. The way she looked at him the night her mother denied her existence on national television; that emptiness, that fear and self-doubt as the idea that she was somehow wrong in some intrinsic way _.  _ As if he’d be angry at her for something she could never have helped, for something that had made her afraid. That’s what made up Ren’s mind. He wasn’t her mother or Fuwa or anyone from her previous life, any of those people who had left her to run off and cry to a fairy in the woods. He wasn’t going to make her hide away or suffer alone. It didn’t matter whether or not he had the right to touch her or not. She needed a hug. So he took another step forward and folded his arms around her, pressing one kiss to her temple and one more to the top of her head. He felt her arms snake up his sides to return the hug, her fingers clenching in fabric and pulling his shirt taut across his back.

 

***

 

Ren watched his reflection with the impassively cheerful face he had perfected since he was fifteen as Jelly Woods ran her expert fingers through his hair and along his scalp. She frowned in concentration and didn’t say a word so he had plenty of time to stare. He still didn’t feel entirely comfortable with seeing Kuon out so obviously. He'd be much happier when he was hidden away again under the laqueur of ‘Tsuruga Ren’. 

The president had called an hour ago to say that Jelly was back in the country. Apparently she was flying out again later that evening and Ren was obliged to go and visit her while he could. Let her have a look at his head. Had his scalp recovered from the years of lies enough to dye it black again? It would at least save Ren from having to wear a wig during  _ all  _ of his jobs. It wasn’t often that he played a foreigner, even with the obvious physical advantage he would have if he did. 

So he sat and watched as Kuon blinked back at him from the mirror and hid his discomfort at the sight with disturbing ease. He had no idea what the president had told Miss Woods about his current… predicament. For all he knew, she might not know anything and he was the thirty year old Hizuri Kuon he’d been the last time he saw her.

Finally, Jelly looked up, making eye contact with Ren in the mirror, and nodded. 

“Okay,” she said. “We could probably do this without sending you bald. You’ve been a good kid this time, Ren-chan.”

“I’m always a good kid, Miss Woods,” he said. 

Jelly sighed and rolled her eyes. “And we’re back to ‘Miss Woods!’ I thought I’d finally weaned you off that.”

Ren felt his stomach knot at his obvious mistake but still managed to smile. Muscle memory was a helpful thing. 

“You know you’ll always be Miss Woods to me,” he said. 

Jelly sighed again and shook her head. She didn’t reply, though. She just turned away to her little trolley covered in tools and dyes and magic. 

They fell into their usual comfortable silence -- there were only so many times a beautician could make small talk with the same client, no matter how good they were -- and Ren watched with no small satisfaction as Kuon disappeared under the tinsel sheets of the foils. 

Jelly had been working for, maybe, ten minutes when Yashiro came in the door, his paper scheduling diary in his hand.

Ren’s eyes flicked up to meet his for a moment before he let his mask settle back into place.

“What are we doing today?” he said.

Yashiro closed the door, leant against the frame and flipped his book open. “Well,” he said, “you have…” He cast a glance at Jelly before he continued. “Uh, two appointments at the hospital this morning.” They both tried to pretend they didn’t see Jelly raise her eyebrows questioningly. “And then there’s an audition for a commercial in the afternoon.”

“That… sunglasses brand, right?” said Ren.

“That’s the one.  _ Blaze _ ,” Yashiro replied.

“A quiet day, then.”

“Well, you should probably do some preparation for that interview tomorrow. Not to mention you have that second call-back later this week.”

Ren looked up at Jelly for a moment. She caught his eye, mid-wipe with some sort of brush against a patch of hair and the inside of a tinsel sheet.

“Hey, don’t worry about me,” she said, carefully folding the foil closed and moving onto the next one. “You can go ahead and talk boring schedule details all you like. I’m just going to be here, doing my thing.”

Ren smiled in thanks and fixed his eyes back on Yashiro’s reflection. It was the closest he could get to talking face to face. 

“What’s the interview about? Are we just trying to keep me relevant or is there a specific purpose?” said Ren.

“Mostly just to keep you in the public eye but the fact that your character is making a guest appearance on  _ Gone for Good  _ is being announced today so they’ll probably ask you about that. Might want to do a bit of… of  _ revision _ , maybe.”

“Okay. I can do that. And the call back? Is that for  _ Save Me _ ?”

“Yes, so you’ll have to do a fair bit of research for that one. And you might want to start prepping for the chemistry test. It’s scheduled for next week at the moment.”

Ren raised an eyebrow. “How do I even know I’m going to make it to the chemistry test?”

“Trust me, Ren. You’ve got this one in the bag. There’s no one on the applicant list as qualified as you for this role.”

It was difficult to convey all that Ren wanted to with just his eyes but he did his best to make them say, ‘but I’m not me at the moment’.

He must have managed it somehow because Yashiro said, “No one even as qualified as you were at twenty.”

That sounded odd -- odd that everyone else auditioning for the role was underqualified. 

“Why not? Is there something you’re not telling me about this role?”

“It’s just that your character is a surgical nurse,” said Yashiro.

Jelly looked up from Ren’s hair. “Seriously?” she sighed and rolled her eyes.  

“That’s it?” said Ren. “That’s the big off-putting factor. A male nurse?”

“Well, that and one of the other main characters is bisexual,” Yashiro added.

Ren’s heart sank. “Really?” he said. “I thought we would have grown up enough by now for that not to be an issue.” 

Wasn’t it supposed to be nine years in the future? Why was this still a problem?

“It’s not,” said Yashiro. He paused and then amended: “Usually. It wouldn’t be a problem at all if there hadn’t been that scandal about Kirihara Masayuki cheating on his wife with a man recently. People are a bit on edge about it at the moment. No one wants to get involved with anything that might be remotely controversial. But you’ve already played a gay character so everyone knows where you stand on the issue. It won’t be a problem.”

Ando Daiki. That was the gay character he played. He remembered him from Kyoko’s and his marathon of their filmographies. He’d been in the supporting cast and killed himself at the end of the drama. It wasn’t nearly the best case of representation. 

He shook his head and tried to concentrate. Yashiro was still talking. 

“So, all I’m saying is that you’re practically guaranteed the part,” he said.

“Because one guy decided to be a terrible husband and set back an entire social movement almost ten years as a result?” said Ren.

Yashiro opened his mouth to argue but Ren sighed -- the sign that he wasn’t going to push the issue any more. 

“And I should start researching,” Ren continued.

“Yes,” said Yashiro. 

Jelly interrupted the tense atmosphere with a long breath out. She nodded and patted Ren twice on the head.

“Right, that’s all set, Ren-chan,” she said. “I’ll be back in ten-ish minutes to check on you. Until then, you two can have all the awkward conversations about discrimination that you want.”

Then she sauntered out of the room.

Yashiro looked at Ren in the silence she left behind.

“Can we not do this anymore?” he said. “You already know I don’t disagree with you.”

Ren laughed. “Sure.”

Yashiro sighed in relief. “So,” he said, “I was thinking maybe you should talk to Aoki-sensei as part of your research. You have to see him today anyway.”

Ren frowned. “What are we testing today?”

Yashiro checked his book again. “Uh, an MRI and and EEG.”

“Right,” said Ren with a sigh. “We’re still on the hunt for where I left my mind.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope I didn't get too political this chapter. I just have some pretty strong feelings about the way bisexuals and bisexuality is represented in anime/manga. It feels like every time some character is bi (and, let's be real, it's pretty darn rare) they're somehow automatically overtly sexual and flirtatious and represented like some sort of sex addict. We're not raging sexual beings unsatisfied with one gender alone!? And skip beat is not entirely innocent of this either! I can't tell you the exact chapter (just that it was in the bottom left panel. my memory works in strange ways) but there's one particular scene where Ren says something nice to Yashiro to throw him off the scent of his true character and Yashiro kind of gives him a side-eye and says something like, 'Are you trying to seduce me? what? finally not satisfied with only women?' And I just... ? !!  
> Anyway... enough of that. There's no point in apologising for bringing sexuality politics into a story and then ranting on and on about it in the notes.   
> This is very much a transition chapter. There's some tying up of loose ends in preparation for the next arc but not really a whole lot of content. I hope you liked it all the same and, hopefully, fingers crossed, I can get passed this sticky bit I'm trying to write now and I'll see you all in only a week's time!  
> Ocean.  
> [P.S sorry i'm posting this on Monday. I've been uncharacteristically busy lately. I'm pretty sure it's still Sunday somewhere, though]


	20. Chapter 20

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry I disappeared for a bit there... I honestly forgot that I was still supposed to be updating...

The interviewer smiled with too-white teeth as she gestured for Ren to sit on the couch. “Tsuruga-san,” she said, “welcome to the show.”

“It’s a pleasure to be here,” said Ren.

“Where have you been Tsuruga-san? We haven’t seen you on our screens for months. Are you working on something top secret?”

Ren laughed politely. “No, no, nothing like that,” he said. “I was working on this one film until recently. It doesn’t come out for another two months, though. I’ll be gone for a while longer.”

“Ooh! A new movie! This is the secret project. So, can you tell us about it? Or is it all hush-hush?”

He pulled a dramatically conflicted face and weighed his hands in front of him as if literally tossing up the options. “Well,” he said, “I haven’t actually asked yet so… I think we should play it safe on that one and not say any more about it.”

The interviewer laughed, tipping her head back in a very staged way. “Fair enough. Fair enough,” she said. “But I hear you're back on  _ Gone for Good _ ? It won’t really be that long until we see you again, then, will it?”

Ren smiled and shook his head a little. “It’s only for two episodes, I'm afraid.”

“Still, Hisato is back. Last we saw of him, he was heading off to the first division and not looking back.”

“Yes, yes, he's swinging with the big kids now up in homicide. But I can say, without giving too much away, that a case appears back in the fourth division and he's called in to lend a helping hand.”

“A bit like Yasuda Takahiro’s character did for the second half of season two.”

“Well, that's how the CIB really works. Everyone's on the same team and sometimes they've got to work together.”

“Of course. Everyone knows that Director Shirai strives for realism in all of his works. Can I ask though, Tsuruga-san, what do you think about Hisato’s come back? What sort of story is it? Worth dragging him back all the way to the fourth division for?”

Ren laughed. “Oh no! Not spoilers!”

“Oh no!”

“What can I say?” said Ren. “It's  _ Gone for Good _ . It's always a very good show. In my opinion, every episode is worth dragging Hisato in. It's just a question of whether his skills are needed or not.”

“And they're needed this time?”

“Yes, they are. You can probably make a guess at what sort of story it will be when homicide and kidnapping team up.”

“I'm willing to bet it'll be a tense one.”

“Oh, it is.”

“Now, Tsuruga-san,  _ Gone for Good _ is the longest running show currently on air. Do you miss it? Do you regret getting out?”

“Do I miss it? Of course I miss it. You get attached to every character you play -- especially ones you play for a long time and I was Hisato for over forty episodes. But, at the same time, it made sense for him to leave. He'd been with the Fourth for almost seven years (in-universe), doing very good work, being showy about it and making his name. He deserved that promotion. And from a story perspective, it just felt like the best conclusion to his character arc.”

“I heard there was talk of killing him off.”

Ren’s brain froze even as the pleasant smile remained on his face. 

Had there? Why on earth hadn't Yashiro warned him about that?

Quick, what  _ did  _ he say?

Ren's mind flashed back to the car ride to the studio. 

Ren had said, “Why’d I get out? I wasn't fired, right?”

And Yashiro had replied, “No, no, you were fine. The president pulled you. Said you were getting ‘stagnant’. And you were getting more and more expensive to employ -- my fault -- and  _ GfG _ ’s always run a tight budget.”

“That's the same as saying I was fired.”

“If you were fired, they would have killed you off.”

Ah, maybe he had said something about it. Not enough, though. 

“So, instead, they tucked me away for when they needed my name to give their show an expensive boost in ratings,” Ren had said. 

“More or less,” replied Yashiro. 

Ren blinked. No more than one second had passed since the interviewer had asked her question. He had his answer. Now he just needed to work out how to word it nicely. 

He started with a blinding smile. 

“Yes,” he said, “we did talk about that for a while but it felt too final and too forced. I, as Tsuruga Ren, wasn't leaving the show. Ichinose Hisato was leaving the division.”

“So, there's a chance you'll be back again.”

“Look, if they need my Hisato back, I'll be there. I just want to do what's best by my character and best for the show.”

“Tsuruga-san, thank you so much for coming on the show today.”

“My pleasure.”

“Just quickly before we go, what's been your favourite episode so far -- or episodes, since  _ Gone for Good  _ tends to work on two-part stories?”

Ren thought about it for a long moment, quickly flicking through the first two seasons in his head. The third had yet to go to box set so he was missing most of it. 

“It would probably have to be -- I don't know the exact episode numbers of it -- that story from season one where the yakuza boss’ son is kidnapped?”

“I know the one.”

“Yeah, Hisato just has this amazing line in it. When Chief Miyamoto is on the phone with the organised crime division, trying to bring them into the fold, Chief Ono of organised crime, played by Toyama Tarou, says, ‘Let them deal with it. They work faster than us and don't want us there, anyway.’

“And Hisato grabs the phone and says, ‘It's our job to keep people safe. And to bring them home safe if we fail at that. Isn't that right, Chief Ono? You might have a grudge against this kid but he's still just a kid. He's still a person and it's still our job to keep him safe.’”

“And then at the end --”

“Ah!” interrupted Ren, laughing again. “More spoilers!”

(At the end, several members of the rival gang are in custody and the kidnapped boy’s yakuza father pays a corrupt officer to unofficially execute them, leading into the main, underlying conflict of the first season; how to save people when you're constantly being undermined from within.)

The interviewer laughed. “Right, of course! Thank you again, Tsuruga-san. Ladies and gentlemen, Tsuruga Ren!”

Ren’s polite, “thank you for having me,” was drowned out by the applause. 

 

***

 

There was a very nice woman -- a woman who didn't recognise her -- sitting next to Kyoko on the train back from Hokkaido. She was an older woman, maybe seventy or so, and they'd had a very pleasant conversation about the benefits of shopping according to the season. 

Kyoko had enjoyed it; enjoyed the anonymity of it. 

She had only taken two steps out of the train station, back home again in Tokyo, when her phone chimed. Moko-san had sent her a picture. A screenshot from twitter with the caption ‘are you befriending strange old ladies again?’

The tweet in the screenshot read:

**#mostadorablething Kyoko3 made friends w/ this baa3 on the Shinkansen. They spent the whole ride talking about cooking. #HizuriKyoko = the +gorgeous person on earth**

The words sat over a blurred photo of her and the old lady taken from between the seats in the row ahead of her. 

Kyoko sighed. So much for anonymity. 

She replied: 

**To: Mooookoooo-saaannn!!**

**She was a very nice woman. And we were talking about grocery shopping, not cooking.**

It still hurt a little to limit her messages to Moko-san to plain text and plain language. But that was the way Kanae wanted it so that was the way she'd write them. 

She sent the message, quickly pocketed her phone and hurried around the corner to where she knew Akechi-san would be waiting. She had to run home for a quick shower before an appointment with Aoki-sensei. She had an EEG booked for that afternoon and, apparently, her hair needed to be squeaky clean for that. 

 

***

 

At hearing Ren’s voice call, “welcome home!” from the living room, Kyoko made an effort to stand a little taller. 

Aoki-sensei had had no news. It was all, “everything looks normal at first glance but don't worry. We might have missed something. We’ll get a technician to take a bit of a closer look at it and send the detailed report over to your referring doctor within the week.” It was nothing she hadn't heard before. Still, there was no need to bring the mood in the whole apartment down just because she was no closer to working out where her memories went. 

So she stood a little straighter, put a smile on her face and headed down the hall to the living room. 

“I'm home,” she said jollily. “Have you eaten?”

One look at Ren’s face made her forced smile look even more out of place. His hair was dark again. That came as something of a surprise. It was still bright blonde when she left on Friday night. But what really shook her was how tired he looked. He was frazzled. His freshly blackened hair stuck up at every angle. He'd obviously run his hands through it more than a few times. He was still wearing the casual suit he probably left the house in that morning. And there was a greasy sheen to his face in the light from the lamp beside the couch, further reinforcing Kyoko’s suspicion that he had yet to shower all day. 

He looked up from the script in his lap and smiled. “Nothing you would count as a meal, I'm sure,” he said. 

He had three textbooks piled up beside him on the couch --  _ Principles of Anatomy _ ,  _ A Theoretical Approach to Medical Science  _ and  _ Basic Physiology _ . The TV was also on browser mode, three tabs open with close-ups of different parts of the human body. It was like he was prepping for an actual medical exam, not just an acting role. 

Kyoko let the fake smile drop from her face and frowned instead. 

“I'll just make something light, then,” she said quietly and headed back into the kitchen. 

When she returned, barely twenty minutes later with rice balls and steamed vegetables, he hadn't moved. The only sign that time still flowed at all in the living room was that the TV now showed the tab featuring a series of complicated tubes and ducts rather than the cross section of a bone that it had before. 

He chewed his lip in concentration as he stared down at the script, only stopping when he felt the need to mouth along with the lines. He didn't even notice Kyoko had re-entered the room until the clatter of the plate against the coffee table woke him. 

“Oh,” he said, looking up again with another smile, “thank you, Kyoko-chan. How was the press tour?”

Kyoko grinned. It had certainly been an experience. 

“It was exciting,” she said. “It was nice to visit Kyoto again and I've never been to Sapporo -- at least, not that I can remember. But Akechi-san had me running around doing so many interviews, I didn't really have a lot of time for sightseeing.”

“We can go again another time. In disguise so you can visit as many tourist spots as you want.”

“Thank you, Tsuruga-san. I think I'd like that.” Then Kyoko looked pointedly from Ren’s face to the plate of rice balls and back again. 

Ren reluctantly leant forward to take one and put it in his mouth. 

Kyoko let a genuine smile spread across her face. She'd always loved watching him eat, loved knowing that she was helping him in some definite,concrete way. 

“You seem busy,” she said. “Who are you this time?”

Ren swallowed his mouthful before he replied. “No one, yet. This is for the audition. And we're still not even sure if the show is going to make it to air.”

“Why not?” asked Kyoko. 

“Haven't found a network to buy it, yet. So the audition is really just for a pilot episode. Even if I get the role, who knows if they'll ask me to come back for the real thing.”

“They will,” Kyoko said definitively, taking a bite of her own rice ball. 

Ren raised his eyebrows in a silent question. 

“You're Tsuruga Ren,” Kyoko supplied as if that was all the justification she would ever need. 

Ren smiled. “Thank you for the vote of confidence.” 

“What’s the pilot episode like?”

He sighed. It was a bit messy, really. They’d need a pretty amazing director to pull it all together. “Well,” he said, “the show follows four characters in one hospital. With the exception of my character, all of them are in their first year of specialisation.”

“What sort of doctors are they? Or nurses -- they could also be nurses.”

Ren laughed. “I’m the only nurse. The others are a cardiologist, a general surgeon and an ER doctor. They all met at med-school. I’m the odd one out, only in the group because I dated into it. Like the awkward in-law.”

Kyoko have a short chuckle. “And what’s the plot like?”

“They all have their own stories but the pilot tends to focus a lot on my character, Iwahara Tooru, and the ER doctor, Yamazaki Koharu. Their anniversary is coming up and Tooru has this big surprise planned. He spends a lot of the episode running around, trying to keep track of Koharu, making sure she doesn’t accidentally stumble across it.”

“That’s cute,” said Kyoko, though really, she was thinking something more along the lines of, ‘shouldn’t he be doing his job?’ “And is she happy with the surprise at the end?”

“Ah,” said Ren awkwardly, “she never sees the surprise. When Tooru is finally ready to reveal it, she’s just had a horrible case that makes the entire surprise seem stupid and frivolous in comparison.”

“Oh,” said Kyoko.

“I’m afraid the episode doesn’t end very happily. Koharu is feeling inept, Tooru never gets to share his surprise, the cardiologist gets dumped via text and the general surgeon is told she’s being sued for malpractice.”

“That sounds horrible!” said Kyoko.

“It is,” said Ren. 

But that was sort of the point. The show wasn’t really about medicine. It was about the gap that exists between dreams and reality. It was about the struggle against despondency. It was about what happened when everything you’d ever wished for came true -- about what that actually looked like. The title,  _ Save Me _ , wasn’t even really about the patients. Yes, the cast saved lives but it was them who really needed saving. 

“But -- if we get a whole season, anyway -- they learn to overcome all those problems,” said Ren hopefully. It was more likely that they simply learnt to live with them but there was no need to crush Kyoko’s idyllic image of life just yet. 

“Well, that’s okay, then,” said Kyoko, obviously relieved.

Ren smiled and then he went back to burying his nose in the script, struggling through the medical jargon. 

“Gla… glome… glomera… glomeroo…” he started muttering barely ten seconds later. 

He gave up on the word, opened a new tab on the TV, typed something quickly into the search bar and hit enter. 

“Glomerulonephritis,” said a friendly, female robot voice from the TV. 

“Glomerulonephritis,” Ren echoed quietly. “Glomeru… Glomerulonephritis.” He grabbed  _ A Theoretical Approach to Medical Science _ and flicked through the pages. “‘An inflammation of the glomerulus.’ Glomerulus?”  _ Principles of Anatomy _ : “‘A network of capillaries located at the beginning of a nephron.’ Well, that’s not very helpful.” To the index again and then flicking back through the pages to the right section. “‘Nephron: the functional unit of the kidney.’ Then ‘glomerulonephritis’ is an inflammation in the capillaries at the beginning of a functional unit of the kidney. So… it would affect blood filtration? Or would it be urine production? Or both?” He reach for  _ A Theoretical Approach to Medical Science  _ again. 

“Can I --?” interrupted Kyoko quietly. “Can I help in any way?”

Otherwise she’d just be sitting there eating. When he was working so hard, that didn’t seem entirely fair. 

Ren looked up from his script again. To tell the truth, he probably needed all the help he could get with this role. By the time human anatomy had turned up in any serious way during high school, he was out getting into fights instead of attending classes. And now he was stuck on a condition that wasn’t even treated surgically. Why would his surgical nurse character need to know this?

Because Iwahara Tooru was a know-it-all. That was why. Ren couldn't pretend not to understand that part of his character. Tooru was brilliant and he knew it. Brilliant and passionate and empathetic -- and shy. It was a quiet passion, one people only discovered when they had known him for a while. 

So he closed his textbooks and turned to Kyoko. “I’d be glad for your help,” he said. He switched to the other couch so that he was sitting beside her and pulled the script over so they could both read it. 

Kyoko tried not to think about how their shoulders were touching or the fact that his face was mere centimetres from hers. 

“Could we run through some scenes?” asked Ren. There was only so much he could do, studying the science behind it by himself. 

“Okay,” said Kyoko, always glad for a chance to act with Tsuruga Ren.

Ren smiled again. “Thank you. This scene and  _ this  _ scene --” he flicked back to a marked page earlier in the script. “-- are the ones for the second audition.”

“Who’s… uh, ‘Kyou’-san?” asked Kyoko. 

Ren looked a little closer at the script. 

“She’s the general surgeon.”

“And ‘Shinobu’-san?”

“He’s the cardiologist.”

“So, I’m… a general surgeon in her first year of specialisation. Her and Tooru-kun are friends...”

“That’s right. So, do you think you could do a basic Kyou for me?”

Kyoko looked up at Ren with a grin. “I can certainly try.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh man... where do I start? This fic and me, we're like... You know when you go to some family gathering, a wedding or funeral or a reunion or something, and you only really know one or two estranged cousins and you don't really get along or anything but everyone else there is a horrendous bigot so you're just kind of stuck together? That's me and this fic; just two awkward distant relatives standing in silence together at the bar because, even though we don't get along, we still wouldn't abandon each other to the rest of the room.  
> That's a very abstract metaphor but it's as close as I can get to describing this feeling. I'm still struggling on with this. I mean, I am back at uni now so I'll have considerably less free time but I'll keep struggling on. Honestly, the biggest motivator at this point is comments (and if I haven't replied yet, I swear I'll get there!). Every time I get some message telling me I've got a comment, there's always this little flutter of motivation because I want to give something back to you all, all you people who've stuck with me all this way and all my terribly inconsistent updates.   
> So thanks. Really. It means a lot.
> 
> Onto the chapter:  
> Again, not a lot of plot this chapter but I would say this is the official start of the third arc. Kyoko's back in Tokyo, Ren's starting his new drama, their relationship is falling into a steady rhythm; we're ready for the next stage. Next chapter is half acting but then the plot starts again. I'll try to set an alarm so I don't forget to update again. 
> 
> So I'll see you all in a fortnight (by which point I will probably be drowning in course work and trying not to cry.) Till then!  
> Ocean.


	21. Chapter 21

It wasn’t a very difficult surgery -- really, it was pretty standard -- and that was why the interns were allowed inside the operating theatre. Tooru watched them cautiously as they scrubbed in, chattering and giggling quietly amongst themselves with excitement while the circulating nurse finished one last check on the theatre. Tooru readied himself in silence -- tucking his hair into the mint-green net, scrubbing his hands up to the elbows and donning the apron, mask, and gloves that he’d put on the exact same way for almost seven years. They’d learn soon enough. Surgeries weren’t anything to be excited over. They were messy and exhilarating at times but there was always an undercurrent of tension that went along with them that demanded a kind of serious concentration that wasn’t seen in many other areas of the hospital. After all, even in the most basic surgery, there was always a chance things could go fatally wrong. 

Kyou pushed into the room with a sweep of the doors, head held high and eyes sharp as glass, and headed straight for the stack of aprons on the side.

“Tooru,” she said quietly as she ripped one out of the sterile plastic covering, “keep an eye on the kids, would you? It’s their first time in. One of them is bound to try something stupid.”

Tooru chuckled and rolled his eyes. “Relax,  _ Niijima-sensei _ ,” he teased. “It’s just an appendectomy. So long as they keep their hands out of the body, it’ll run just like normal.”

“I actually wouldn’t put it passed them,” she said, moving to the sinks. “These kids are all nutters with hero-complexes. Please tell me Shinobu and I weren’t like that when we were interns.”

Tooru smiled as the circulating nurse came into the room and shot Kyou a thumbs up. Kyou nodded in response and finished pulling on her gloves.

“I wouldn’t know,” said Tooru. “While you were being a reckless intern and rooting around in some unsuspecting patient’s intestines, I was still stuck in a classroom, doped up on caffeine and stress.”

Kyou smirked. “Well, let’s just give me the benefit of the doubt, then,” she shot over her shoulder before she turned back to her interns. “Right,” she said, “we’re gonna head in now and -- You,” she pointed at a tall girl at the back of the group, “get out.”

The girl looked around her for a moment, wondering who was being called out before they’d even entered the theatre. But there was a rather obvious gap around her as the other interns stepped away.

“Me?” she said.

“Yeah, you,” replied Kyou. “What’s your name?”

“Su-Suzuki, Niijima-sensei.”

“Right, Suzuki-san. What are you wearing?”

The girl looked down as if she suspected she might have accidentally stumbled into work naked and hadn’t noticed yet. “Uh, scrubs?”

“And those?” Kyou pointed at her feet.

“They’re just my shoes, Sensei.” The girl’s voice was growing crisp and angry. 

“They’re heels. As a surgeon, you’re expected to be on your feet all day. We’re talking eight or nine sometimes twelve or sixteen hours standing up, working, concentrating, not getting distracted by how much your feet hurt because you wore impractical shoes. Someone’s life is in your hands. Don’t bother about trying to be fashionable here, Suzuki. No one’s looking at  _ you _ .”

Tooru watched as the girl’s jaw clenched, unclenched and then clenched again as she bit back whatever retort had been on the tip of her tongue. But there wasn’t a lot you could say back to Niijima Kyou when she got like this. Nothing stood between her and a job well done. Not even the footwear choices of someone who would only be standing in a corner and taking notes.

“So get out, go home and change your shoes. Then I’ll let you into my theatre,” snapped Kyou. “And, Suzuki?” she added as the girl turned to leave with her anger still barely contained beneath the surface. “Don’t bother with make-up tomorrow. It just rubs off on the inside of your mask, anyway.”

Suzuki glared then, let the full icy force of it shoot out to stab at her boss, before she swept out of the prep room like a wronged empress.

Tooru couldn’t help a little snort of laughter at that thought.

 

Kyoko turned back from the pillow that was standing in for the actress that would play Suzuki with a brilliant smile. 

“How was that?” she said, eyes alight.

Ren smiled too, placed the palms of his hands against her lower back and bent to press his nose against her shoulder in the closest he could get to a full-body glomp without the possibility of frightening her.

“I think,” he said lowly, “that if the actress playing Kyou is half as sharp as you were, then this drama is going to be something to watch.”

He felt, rather than saw, the blush sweep up her neck. It was a soft warmth growing beside his cheek and he couldn’t help the dazed smirk it brought to his face.

“Do you know who it’s going to be, yet?” she asked stiffly after a moment.

“Hmm…” Ren hummed into her skin, “The writer’s really pushing for Saito Nami.”

“Wasn’t she --?”

“Yeah, you worked with her on  _ Concrete Jungle _ .”

Kyoko sighed. “So I’m supposed to know her…”

“You shouldn’t see her unless you come to the set,” he said. “Not that I don’t want you to come to set.”

Kyoko just sighed again. “Should we try the second scene?” she said. “I’m both Koharu-chan and Savannah-san, right?”

“That would be helpful,” said Ren.

 

The emergency department was chaotic as it always was. But it was a controlled chaos, a carefully crafted and organised chaos. Tooru stopped at the door and peered in. It didn’t particularly matter if Koharu saw him now. In fact, he needed her to see him if he was ever going to catch her attention and bring her to the roof where the surprise waited. 

He glanced around the room where doctors, surgeons, nurses and technicians hurried like ants across the plastic laminate floor with gurneys and clean medical aprons and X-ray machines and ECG monitors and IVs. But Koharu was nowhere to be found. 

He saw Savannah Johnson, though. She was hunched over a scrawny man who writhed and fought help with every ounce of his being -- obviously not entirely aware of what was happening around him. Savannah took a punch to the jaw before security was called in to hold the man down long enough to get an IV in him. Except, of course, that his veins had collapsed due to drug abuse. 

“Anyone got a vein yet?” shouted Savannah over the noise the man was making and the general hubbub that always lived in A&E. “Anyone? Right, someone page orthopaedics. We’re going for the IO.”

Tooru watched in awe as the orthopedist rushed passed him to the man’s curtained off cubicle, drilled a hole through his shin to the bone marrow and attached the drip. Within minutes, the sedative began to take effect and the man was calming. 

Savannah leant back and wiped her sleeve across her forehead, taking a breather. Tooru took his chance. 

“Johnson-sensei,” he said, ducking his head into the cubicle. “Do you know where Yamazaki-sensei is?”

Savannah pulled her glasses from her face and wiped them on a corner of her scrubs. “Her shift’s done. Last I saw, she was heading for the gym.”

“Thank you,” said Tooru and headed out of A&E again. It was really not the sort of place you could be unless you were helping. 

 

(“Ready?” said Ren. “This is a new setting.”

Kyoko took off the non-prescription glasses, shuffled the script in her hand and nodded.)

 

The gym was mainly used for physical therapy but that didn’t stop a lot of the staff heading down to the basement in their breaks to let off some steam. Tooru saw Koharu the second the elevator dinged and he stepped out onto the foam sprung floor. 

She was in the boxing corner, beating a poor punching-bag into oblivion.

Sweat slipped out of her hair and ran down her face, flicking up off the ends of her ponytail when she dipped to kicked the bag in its imaginary throat. She punched and she kicked and beat it with her palms. All the while, the look on her face grew more and more vicious and the sweat kept rolling down her body, staining her sports bra dark grey.

“Koharu,” called Tooru but she didn’t turn around. She just kneed the punching bag in the guts. “Koharu!” called Tooru again. She shook his voice away with a grunt and rammed the heel of her palm into the bag’s chin. 

Tooru finally reached her side, put a hand on her shoulder, and pulled her around to face him. She swung a right hook at his face. He squeaked, ducked and threw his hand up to protect himself. The fist bounced painfully against his forearm.

“Oh,” panted Koharu, finally coming back to her senses. “Tooru. I didn’t see you.”

“What happened?” asked Tooru, instantly serious despite the throbbing ache in his ulna. “You don’t get this violent unless something has happened. Are you alright?”   
Koharu let out a breathy laugh and reached for her towel. “Oh, don’t mind me,” she said. “I’m just beating my frustrations out.” She wiped the sweat from her face and hung the towel around her neck.

“Koharu…” Tooru insisted.

A pained expression came into her eyes and she practically flopped onto the ground. She sighed and leant against the wall. 

“A fourteen year old rape victim,” she said eventually. “Fourteen. I mean, no one should ever have to go through that but she was  _ fourteen _ , Tooru. And all I could do for this girl was clean her up, give her some birth control and send her on her way. While the monster who did it gets to continue going about his life like nothing happened at all.”

“She knows who it was?” said Tooru quietly, coming to sit beside her. 

Koharu nodded.

“Then she could press charges.”

Koharu scoffed. “She’s not going to press charges.”

“She might.”

“She won’t.”

“You don’t know that. She might just do it.”

“No, she  _ won’t _ ,” Koharu snapped. “She’s  _ fourteen _ , Tooru. She hasn’t even told her parents about it. There’s no way she’s ever going to press charges. She’s going to have to go to school, every day, and sit in the same classroom as that boy. And she’ll wonder, ‘how is this happening? Why is this okay?’ every day. Every single day. And he won’t give a shit about any of it.”

Tooru didn’t know what to reply to that. There was nothing he  _ could  _ say. It happened. It happened far more than people wanted to realise and, often, no one but the bastard and their victim ever found out about it. And nothing he could say to Koharu would ever change that.

“What am I doing?” she muttered, letting her head fall onto her knees. “I’m not saving people.”

Again, Tooru didn’t reply. He just wrapped his arm around her and pulled her into his side, their heads falling against each other. 

Somehow that surprise -- those flowers and that chocolate and those terrible instant noodles they’d eaten in college together, the ones that reminded them of their beginnings and the hopeful days of the past -- didn’t seem appropriate anymore. So he left the picnic there on the roof and never went back for it. 

 

“Are you okay?” whispered Ren three minutes later when Kyoko had yet to pull herself from his arms.

She nodded but she was biting her lip so hard it drew blood. 

“Just a bit hard to separate from Koharu’s feelings?” he asked. 

Kyoko nodded again. Then she laughed, suddenly and breathily. 

“I don't know how to kickbox at all!” Somehow, she sounded like she might cry. 

Ren chuckled. “I could tell.”

Kyoko made a face but it quickly melted into a smile. Ren was glad to watch the last of Koharu’s frustration and outrage slip off her face. Sometimes, ignorance really was bliss. 

“Maybe I should learn,” she said. “I might need it for a role, one day.”

He let his arm drop from her shoulder to around her waist and pulled her fully against him. He would always love the way she fit so perfectly against his side, even if she did tense up everytime he did it. 

“I think,” he said, “that if you add kickboxing classes on top of your current schedule, you'll work yourself to death. Better save it for when you actually need it.”

Then he felt something magical against his skin. Kyoko actually relaxed. He felt the tension seep out of her as she leant her head against his shoulder and closed her eyes with a soft laugh. 

“Maybe,” she said. 

It was Ren who was tense then. Tense with joy and gratitude as he felt her drift off to sleep on his shoulder. And he wondered if, maybe, he was doing things right after all. Maybe he did make her feel safe. 

 

***

 

Kyoko sat in her dressing room the next morning with Akechi Nao, staring down at the words before her in disbelief. The PA had just handed her the script for episode six. It was a big episode. Kanon-chi goes to the police with her information, Miyajima is arrested on corruption charges, Kanon feels relieved that the rot is gone only to be hit with a bombshell at the end: Miyajima wasn’t arrested due to her evidence, the higher ups just got sick of him and wanted him out of the office so they could have him killed quietly. It looked interesting. There were a wide range of emotions there for Kyoko to show. There were just two little things that she didn't feel entirely comfortable with. 

  1. Kanon and Onoda become proper lovers.
  2. Kanon discovers she’s pregnant.



Kyoko looked up from the page to Nao who hovered worriedly nearby. “Akechi-san,” she said, “did I know about this? Before I lost my memory, did I know this was going to happen?”

It mirrored her life too closely. It was Kyoko’s worst fear -- one she had only just dispelled. And now she would have to live it. She would have to dive in as deep as she could, analyse it and dredge it back to the surface so that she could turn it into her own reality. 

Nao nodded. “We discussed it extensively when you were still trying to decide whether or not to take the part.”

“So… So I can’t ask the director -- No, I couldn’t do that anyway,” said Kyoko. “That would be the height of unprofessionalism.”

“I could still try to talk to him,” said Nao.

Kyoko shook her head firmly. “No,” she said, “I’ll just have to do it.”

It was just a question of how. She had no idea whether she could. Was she even capable of acting like a mother? She could feel her brows knitting together at just the thought.

“It gets worse,” Nao said and Kyoko looked back to her again.

How on earth could it possibly get worse?

“Do you have the script for episode seven there as well?” she went on.

Kyoko flicked through the thick booklet in her lap and, sure enough, underneath episode six was both episode seven and episode eight.

She nodded.

“Have a look,” said Nao.

Kyoko skimmed through the episode. More scenes of being ostracised by her co-workers for being a snitch, more fear as she realises just how much bigger this is than she thought it was, more scenes with Onoda Tomoki where he reassured her she was making the right decision, they decided to get married, and then… 

It felt like someone had just pulled the rug out from beneath her feet. But, she supposed, that was the point.

“Really?” she croaked at Nao.

Onoda Tomoki betrays Kanon. No, that’s not quite accurate. He’d never been loyal to her in the first place. He’d become lovers with her,  _ impregnated  _ her, agreed to marry her, all with the intention of spying on her.

“Keep going,” said Nao. “That’s still not the worst part.”

Kyoko kept reading. It was all as she had expected -- all at the same level of gut-wrenchingly awful -- until the last scene. 

Kanon walks along a bridge late at night as an acoustic cover of the show’s theme plays softly in the background. Her walk is uneven, almost a stagger under the growing weight of her stomach and the onslaught of her feelings. Silent tears wind down her face. There’s not another soul to be seen anywhere. 

Then the music suddenly stops. She looks to the side, at the railing to the bridge. The night is dark, the city lights shine brightly, the silence left by the music is filled with traffic noise and the sound of rushing water nearby. Slowly, she walks over to the railing. Slowly, she clambers over. The episode ends like that. With Kanon staring out, blank-eyed at the black river that surges below, back pressed to the railing, one hand cradling her belly. She sways -- and the episode cuts there. 

Please, no. 

Please, please, no. 

Kyoko wasn't even entirely sure what she was begging for. ‘Please don't let Kanon-chi die like this’? ‘Please, I don't think I can act this’? All she knew was, there really couldn’t be a much worse scene for Kyoko. 

Kanon was both her past and her present. She was her mother -- betrayed and hurting and feeling like her options were quickly running out, who had lost sight of her passions and aspirations and could only see one possible solution. And then she was Kyoko herself who couldn’t even contemplate the thought of motherhood without wanting to throw up.

And she was what Kyoko would have to become very soon. 

“She doesn’t --?” she managed to croak out.

Nao shook her head. “It wouldn't be much of a show if she did. There are still four more episodes after that one. I just thought you should know. That was the scene that made you question whether or not to take the role for three months.”

_ Why didn't you tell me sooner, then?  _ Kyoko wanted to ask. But that wasn't exactly fair. It hadn't been Akechi-san who wrote the script. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like this chapter deserves a really long and passionate note (since it's a turning point and -- holy crap -- the the content) but I'm pretty sick at the moment and my brain's not exactly working well. I'll just have to let it speak for itself. Might come back when i'm well again if there was something pressing I needed to say.  
> See you all in a fortnight!  
> Ocean.


	22. Chapter 22

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please don't get too excited. I'm still not truly back yet. I just wanted to give you a new chapter as thanks to all the people who've left comments in my very long absence. Thank you so much for your understanding. I hope you enjoy it :)

“So, what do you think I should do?” asked Kyoko miserably, stirring her half-melted ice-cream in its cup.

The shop was a quiet one, hidden in the shadow of a much larger chain store, but Kanae still wore her large sunglasses. She tapped them back up onto their place on her nose and took a long sip from her smoothie. 

What did she think? She thought it was definitely too cold to be eating ice cream, was what she was thinking. But that probably wasn’t what Kyoko had in mind. 

So she scoffed and said, “You already know what you should do. You’ve committed to the project. You’ll just have to find a way to make it work.”

“I don’t know if I ca -- I mean, I’m not sure I know how.”

Kanae pushed her sunglasses up on top of her head just so Kyoko could see her rolling her eyes. “What are you afraid of? It’s not a real kid.”

“I don--”

“Are you scared it’s going to grow up unloved? That’s ridiculous. You know better than anyone that Kanon wouldn’t let that happen. How was it you described her? She’s too ‘determined to be good’,” Kanae interrupted.

Kyoko sighed and placed her ice cream cup back on the table. “It’s not that,” she said. “I know Kanon-chi would do everything she could for her child. I just… I don’t…” The words were sticking now. She couldn’t quite order them so that they’d slip from her throat, coherent and true. “I don’t know how to be a mother, Moko-san,” she eventually settled on.

Kanae looked at her, searching her face for the rest of the truth she was sure Kyoko was still holding back, and then picked up her smoothie again. “Neither does Kihara Kanon,” she said quietly. 

Kyoko just sighed. 

Kanae watched her for a long while, the slump in her shoulders and the sag in her usually perfect posture. This was quite a sticking point. Because obviously this wasn’t something that Kyoko felt she could do but it wasn’t exactly a topic Kanae had a lot of experience in. Yes, she had a lot of younger siblings but she’d never been their mother. And apparently her way of interacting with children wasn’t ‘normal’ or ‘safe’. Some people just needed to harden up a little. 

But Kyoko, who was usually so strong, was stuck and Kanae’s unorthodox childhood couldn’t help this time. She didn’t doubt that Kyoko would pull something miraculous out of the bag. She always did. But that didn’t mean that she didn’t feel more than a little lost sitting there watching as her best friend battled against her memories and her sense of staunch professionalism. 

In the end, Kanae didn’t say anything. She just snapped her fingers and said, “Right. Next problem. You said there were two.”

Kanae knew moments before she opened her mouth that Kyoko was about to lie. Her smile was too wide, her eyes too sharp. 

“Oh, don't worry about that, Moko-san,” Kyoko lied. “It was only a small problem, I don't want to bother you with it.”

“Kyoko.” Kanae frowned just as a child ran full speed into the leg of Kyoko’s chair and an entire cone of ice cream fell into her lap. 

Silence reigned for a long moment. The child stared down at his ruined dessert in the lap of a stranger. The little boy’s mother stood two steps away, hands still outstretched as if to catch him. Kanae carefully hid her face behind her sunglasses again. And Kyoko kept that stupid, plastic smile on her face without a twitch. Then the boy screamed and all hell broke loose as the small shop on the corner came alive with his mother's apologies and Kyoko’s reassurances and all the onlookers leaning back nosily in their chairs to see what all the fuss was about, whispering to each other. Kanae just put her head in her hands and hoped they wouldn't be recognised as the child kept screaming. 

“Stop that,” Kyoko finally snapped quietly and sharply and with such authority that the silence flooded back. “Look, if you help me clean this up, you can have my ice cream.”

The boy frowned. His mother offered hurried refusals, insisting it wasn't necessary. And then the boy nodded.

What was Kyoko talking about, saying she didn't know how to act like a mother? When there she was, skillfully mothering someone else’s brat into helping out the workers of one small ice cream shop like she did this every day. She was born for it. The perfect blend of unrelenting and kind with enough bad life experience to avoid being an ignorant role model. But fear was fear, Kanae supposed; often irrational by nature. And Kyoko was terrified of motherhood. 

Meanwhile, Kyoko sat in her chair, dabbed at her skirt with a wad of damp napkins and gave soft-voiced instructions to the little boy wiping the mess from the floor, trying desperately to think of something to change the topic. She had to move the conversation away from the direction it had been heading. It was a mistake to even tell Moko the exact number of issues she had with the new script to begin with. Because this second problem… it definitely wasn't one she could discuss in public without blushing. 

 

***

 

Aoki-sensei really was something of a career-saver at this point. He’d barely blinked an eyelid at the prospect of appearing on national television for the sake of interpreting his famous patient’s CT scan and then, when Ren had asked if he could shadow him for a day as research for his next role, he’d almost immediately agreed -- only stopping to make sure he understood the terms of doctor-patient confidentiality -- and introduced him specifically to a male nurse friend of his.

It was odd, really, that he didn’t seem to even notice what he was doing. He just waved away any insinuation that he could possibly be doing something abnormal, or going above the regular demands of his job. He was just doing the least that anyone would, according to him. Still, Ren didn’t want to question his sudden good luck. If he could shadow a real surgical nurse then that was good enough for him. 

Saito Ayumu was odd in his own right again. First of all, he didn’t seem to notice or mind Aoki-sensei’s long, jargon-filled monologues even when they got so far off topic it was debatable whether he remembered they were there at all. He just smiled fondly and rested his head on his fist, leaning against the cheap plastic table of the hospital cafeteria, and waited for the radiologist to wear himself out. A young man with a baby face who couldn’t have been out of college for long, Ayumu spoke quietly and passionately but with a strange undercurrent of cynicism that was so subtle Ren didn’t even notice it at first. And he didn’t recognise Ren at all when they were introduced -- something that made the actor’s ego sting a little despite what he would like others to believe. 

“So, what would you like to know?” Ayumu said in one of the short breaks that Aoki-sensei allowed. “I’m afraid I haven’t been here long so I can’t let any truly formidable skeletons out of the closet but I’ll do what I can.”

“Really, all I was looking for was a sense of what it was like to work in this particular job. The pressures you face from your co-workers or the patients, the things that make you want to come into work in the morning. Just general life in the hospital so that I can build up a sense of the atmosphere I should be creating.”

Ayumu looked slightly taken aback at that. “Really?” he said. “Well, that’s a lot simpler than I thought it would be.” He thought for a moment. “I suppose you mean being a man in a traditionally female occupation? It’s really not such a big deal anymore. You get the occasional granny or grandpa who confuse you for a doctor, sometimes you’ll blow a little boy’s mind when he realises it’s an option. But, for the most part, especially in regards to co-workers, there’s really no difference between me and my female counterparts. As for the general atmosphere…” Here he paused and looked around the busy cafeteria filled with staff and patients and family alike, all similar in their sense of exhaustion but otherwise completely alien to each other; a perfect blend of status, education and beliefs united in their search for food. “I guess you’ve just got to hang around long enough to pick it up.”

“And you don’t mind me following you for the day?” asked Ren.

“Well, I can’t take you into surgery or, really, to meet any of the patients but if you want to walk down corridors together or sit and watch me do paperwork then sure. Go ahead.”

 

And that’s exactly what Ren did. 

He kept to the edges, out of the way, but spent the rest of the day scurrying down corridors between store rooms, watching as Ayumu cleaned scalpels at the speed of light (somehow without cutting himself), listening from the hallway as he talked a patient down from hysteria so that they’d get in the damn wheelchair and could be taken to their surgery, as he ripped apart operating theatres and put them back together again cleaner and more sterile than ever before, and sitting in the staff room surrounded by dirty coffee mugs and wading through his own weight in paperwork. And, by the time the sun set and Ayumu’s shift came to an end, Ren had never been so glad he went into acting. 

“So, what did you think?” asked Ayumu, dressed in his casual clothes again as they took a shortcut through the ICU back to the entrance. He didn’t seem any different than he had appeared that morning, eyes still shining with that same dark intelligence, all exhaustion hidden away. 

Ren just sighed and Ayumu laughed. 

The hallway was practically empty, only a technician that ducked in and out of patients’ rooms joined them, and it was silent other than the gentle hiss of the life support machines behind each door. The sound swelled and fell like the way Yashiro snored when he had a cold, growing and growing until breaking point and then deflating again. And, consistently, there was that beeping, a sound that produced the image of medical dramas in a pavlovian reaction in Ren’s head. 

“I’d always known that medical professions were stressful but I have an extra respect for them after today,” said Ren. “I’m so tired that, if it weren’t for that beeping, I could probably fall asleep on my feet right here.”

Ayumu laughed again. “You’re so tired, you’re hallucinating, Hizuri-san. There is no beeping.”

“From the machines?”

“These rooms are soundproofed for the privacy of the families.”

Ren stopped walking and frowned, head tilted as if the change in angle would be enough to make that beeping that was  _ definitely still there  _ go away. Then he shook his head. He was exhausted, after all. 

“So they are,” he said with a blinding smile. “How silly of me.”

 

***

 

There were two girls -- women, now, really -- who had been coming to Take5! Karaoke for close to ten years. Satsuki didn’t know their names and he probably wouldn’t recognise them in a crowd but there, amongst the familiar scenery of the shop, they were iconic. 

They didn’t come everyday. Sometimes barely once a month. But they had two rather memorable traits. They were pretty — one had always been glamorous but the other seemed to have grown into her beauty as the years passed by — and they were odd. They almost never used the machines, which seemed strange to Satsuki. Surely if you were renting a karaoke booth, you were there to sing. But their room tended to stay silent. So they became staples of Take5! and regulars to the point where the smaller one greeted Satsuki by name with a smile and a wave as he stood behind the front desk.

“Sakakibara-san! Good afternoon! It’s been awhile, how are you?” She was the definition of politeness. The other girl just stood with her arms crossed and one hip jutted out, waiting in silence behind her huge, round sunglasses.

“I’m very well,” Satsuki replied. “Your usual room, girls?”

“If it’s free. But any will do,” said the shorter girl just as Megu-chan came back in from her break to take over the front desk again.

Megu froze the second her eyes landed on the girls. She just stood there, whatever words she had been about to say stuck on her tongue. Satsuki flicked her a short look out of the corner of his eye but quickly turned his attention back to his customers and, with a smile signed them into the room. 

“Do you know them?” Megu burst out in a fierce whisper the second the girls had left. 

Satsuki frowned. “They’re regulars?”

“No! That’s not what I meant! Are you friends?”

“Not… Not really?” He raised one eyebrow, not exactly sure where this was going. 

“Oh my -- You don’t even know who they are!” She was shouting in her whispered voice now, her eyes still making anxious twitches towards the stairwell the girls had disappeared up. When Satsuki didn’t move to reply in the 0.3 seconds Megu allowed him, she cut in with another whispered exclamation. “That’s Kotonami Kanae! Greatest actress of our time! And Hizuri Kyoko, the most changeable face in showbiz! God, I can’t believe you’re so ignorant!”

Satsuki snorted a laugh, though even he was looking to the stairwell by then, curious. “It just never really came up,” he said. “Don’t you dare go ask for an autograph. You’re on desk duty for the next two hours.”

Megu groaned but dutifully took up her place behind the desk. And even if her eyes did stray to the stairs more often than not, no one but Satsuki seemed to notice.

 

***

Kyoko sat twiddling her thumbs, knees pressed together to still their trembling, as Kanae read through the final pages of the script for episode seven. The thought that she might not be allowed to show the script to outsiders did briefly flicker across her mind but Kanae was intensely obedient when it came to the rules of showbiz. She could be trusted with  _ Cross the Floor _ ’s secrets. 

She tried to gauge her friend’s reaction as she read but Kanae was impassive. The room was entirely silent other than the occasional turning of the page and Kanae’s face was completely void of emotion. There was nothing to hint what her opinion would be when she finished, nothing to hint what she would say.

At last she sighed, flicked back several pages in the script and slapped it down on the table between them.

“This scene, right?” Kanae said. “This is the one you’re struggling with.”

“How did you know?” Kyoko gasped but Kanae just rolled her eyes, leaned back in her plastic laminated seat and crossed her arms.

“Please,” she huffed, “This is exactly the sort of thing you’d have problems with at sixteen. You’re forgetting how long I’ve known you.”

“So, what do I do?” asked Kyoko, eyes bright and ready to learn but still with that same slouch to her shoulders that she’d acquired since she’d first looked through the script. 

“What do you mean, ‘what should you do’? It’s just a kiss. You realise you’ve done screen kisses before, right?”

“It’s not just a kiss,” Kyoko hissed as if they could somehow be overheard in the soundproof karaoke booth. “If it were just a kiss, I could employ the actor’s rule of the heart and move forward with the project.” She yanked the script off the table and fanned wildly through the pages back to the problem scene -- the scene where Onoda Tomoki literally carried Kanon across the room, shedding clothes, legs wrapped around his waist and kissing all the while. 

“I’ve never done anything like  _ this  _ before!” Kyoko’s tone was growing desperate now as she stabbed a finger at the words on the page and Kanae fixed her with a look. “I don’t  _ remember  _ ever doing anything like this,” Kyoko amended, red-faced. “I don’t know what I may have… The point is, where do I put my hands? How high are my legs supposed to be? His hips? His waist? How tight do I need to hold on? How am I supposed to… to t-take off my blouse while…? I don’t know what I’m  _ doing _ .” She finished, head in her hands and ears a flaming pink. Kanae had barely been able to make out the last words, they’d been so muffled by fingers and embarrassment. “And if I’m Hizuri Kyoko, if I’m married and have been married for years, it doesn’t make sense that such a scene would stump me. I can’t ask the director for help.”

Kotonami Kanae stared at her friend for a long moment. This was a rare Kyoko. She was often stuck on roles, that wasn’t exactly new, but never before had Kanae seen her so hopeless. She was Kyoko -- she’d never been anything less than determined to succeed, ambitious, forward facing and diligent. And yet, here she sat, crumpled on a worn plastic covered seat in a cheap karaoke booth, completely laid low by a kiss scene. It didn’t make sense. Nothing was supposed to touch her. She was supposed to be unstoppable. She always had been. Ever since that first  _ Kurara  _ audition, Kanae had known it. Mogami Kyoko was dauntless. 

Until now.

She sighed but didn’t reply, merely picked up the booth’s phone and ordered herself an iced tea. She had the feeling this would take longer than she’d like. Megu appeared at the door a suspiciously short amount of time later, tea on a tray and adorned with a generous number of ice cubes. Kyoko still hadn’t moved. At last, Kanae took a dramatic sip and spoke.

“Jeez,” she said, “I can’t tell you -- and I frankly don’t want to know -- what you and Kuon-san have gotten up to since you’ve been married. But that doesn’t change the fact that you’re married to him now. You might not be able to ask the director for help but Kuon-san knows about your…” She gestured up and down Kyoko’s body vaguely, “ _ Problem.  _ So ask him.”

“You mean, practice  _ this scene _ with Tsuruga-san?”

Kanae shrugged, no doubt a habit she’d picked up from the man himself at some point. “Why not? You could start with that, right there.”

“With what?”

“The way you call him. If he were in Onoda Tomoki’s position, if he were your new lover, would you really still be calling him by his stage-surname-plus-san?”

“What did..?” said Kyoko. “What did I used to call him?”

“Too many things!” Kanae replied. “He was ‘Ren-san’ the actor and ‘Kuon-kun’ at home and ‘Corn’ when you wanted something -- whatever that means…”

“I didn’t… I didn’t tell you about Corn, did I?”

Kanae glared at her, letting her voice drop to an icy tone. “Should you have?”

Kyoko shook her head frantically until Kanae’s glare eased.

“It really shouldn’t be that difficult,” said Kanae eventually with a sigh. “I mean, you worked out your weird misunderstanding, didn’t you? Just talk to him about it. Do us all a favour and accelerate your relationship a little so we don’t have to sit through your awkward phase twice.”

“There’s no other option?” 

Kanae took another sip of her tea with a smirk. “Not unless you have a suggestion.”

Kyoko just dropped her head back into her hands with a groan. 

**Author's Note:**

> So, hello friends.  
> This story is based on a mix of: a dress I drew and really wanted to make Kyoko wear because I'm evil (it shows up in chapter 13. You'll have to be patient); a fic I read that didn't live up to potential (they explained the memory loss with the 'alcohol' explanation that always has me doubting whether the author has ever actually been drunk); and something else that I can't tell you yet without ruining the whole flipping twist (but I really want to). 
> 
> Right, I'll stop rambling now. I hope you stick around. Come on a journey with me as this story sucks up every single plot idea I've ever had, I go into hasty research about spinal fractures and Japanese manners and we all get very lost in the endless pursuit of the main twist!  
> Also: I feel bad asking, since I've been gone so long but if you like what I do you can always [buy me a kofi?](https://ko-fi.com/U7U2GBKM) Maybe? Just think about it...
> 
> [edit 25.12.2016: Can I just say, this fic has now reached over 1000 hits and that is actually a huge milestone for me. I just really wanted to take ten seconds and tell you all how happy and grateful I am. Thank you so much for reading these ramblings of mine. I'm so glad you're here.]
> 
> [edit II: I'm pretty sure I've forgotten to tell you that I'm on tumblr [here](https://thecowardlycreative.tumblr.com/) at my writing blog.]


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